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THE

ENJOYMENT OF
LITERATURE

by
ELIZABETH DREW

CAMBRIDGE

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1935

For permission to use selections the author
is indebted to the following:

William Heinemann Ltd. for passages from Edmund
Gosse's Father and Son.

Macmillan & Co., Ltd. for passages from the Iliad
and the Odyssey by Lang, Leaf & Myers; and from
Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts.

COPYRIGHTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BY W. W. NORTON <5c COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

With love

to
B. W. D.

CONTENTS

PREFACE ix

THE LITERATURE OF GOSSIP 15

THE ESSAY 38

LYRIC POETRY 62

BIOGRAPHY 78

THE NOVEL 109

EPIC AND NARRATIVE POETRY 147

DRAMA 172

THE CRITIC AND THE WORLD TODAY . .210
INDEX 227

vii

PREFACE

XHERE are all kinds of creative artists in the field of
literature, but there is only one kind of critic of books
who is of the least value, and that is the critic who makes
us want to go and read the books he criticizes. The func-
tion of criticism is to send people to literature.

And the aim of the teaching of literature is the same.
The facts of literary history can be taught, but the only
way in which the love of literature can be taught is by
arousing the desire to read literature, and all the teacher
can do towards that end is to describe and analyze his
own enjoyment, to try to communicate his own sources
of human and intellectual and artistic delight in books.

The heart of that delight is the same for everyone, for
the power and the glory of literature will always be that
it enlarges and enriches life. That is its value to the most
primitive as well as to the most accomplished reader; it
is its universal and comprehensive activity. The small
child, spelling out Robinson Crusoe or Winnie the Pooh,
and the cultivated reader of Paradise Lost or War and
Peace, are alike finding in books an extension and expan-
sion of their actual living in the world of men.

D. H. Lawrence says in one of his letters, 'If I were
talking to the young, I should say only one thing to
them . . . Try to find out what life is, and live.' There
is no better exhortation, but the life of even the freest
and most active of us is strictly and sternly limited, and

x PREFACE

it is the chief of the enjoyments of literature that
through it we can share in a range of experience which
we can touch in no other way. It may be that these
modes of living are utterly remote from any we know
in our daily lives, and indeed the most widely read of
all literature is of this kind. It has been labelled by the
psychologists the literature of escape, and it is the result
of the common human craving for 'something dif-
ferent/ for a refuge from the dullness and drabness, the
harshness and baseness and emotional poverty of much
of the real world. In such literature the writer creates in
the place of the real world, a world whose standards are
free from the thwarting bounds of the actual, and the
reader follows him there. He may escape with the author
of The Arabian Nights or Treasure Island into the world
of practical or romantic adventure; br with the poets of
La Belle Dame Sans Merci or of The Lady of Shalott
into the world of sensuous dream. Or, 011 a lower literary
level, he may follow the writers of a hundred best-
sellers into a world of comforting and comfortable
wish-fulfillment, where the mighty fall and the lowly
are lifted up; where all the women crackle with sex-
appeal, and all the men manage to combine the attrac-
tions of the cave-dweller with those of the perfect Eng-
lish gentleman.

The literature of escape will always flourish. We all
live, as Dr. Johnson said, in a world bursting with sin
and sorrow. Life is unintelligible and monotonous, hu-
man relationships are inevitably unsatisfactory, human
experience is inevitably circumscribed, and every in-
dividual is the victim of what Walter de la Mare calls
'poor mortal longingness.' But the worlds to which
books introduce us can, if we will let them, play parts
in our lives and their developments infinitely more wide
and varied than those of anodynes for life's distresses
and havens from life's unrest. Literature is not only a

PREFACE xi

refuge from life, it is a revelation of life. It is the com-
munication, in words, of every imaginable kind of hu-
man experience, from the most profound to the most
trivial, from the pinnacle to the pinpoint, from a nut-
shell to infinite space.

To suggest some of the human and intellectual and
artistic stimulus to be found in literature is the aim of
this book. The only difficulty has been to know where
to begin. But as the book is not intended for those
whose taste is already assured and sophisticated, but is
written as a help to those readers who need a more de-
tailed and definitive approach, its arrangement is par-
ticular rather than general. When Aristotle said that
Tragedy should not be expected to produce every kind
of pleasure, but the kind proper to it, he said something
profound about every kind of literature, and the
method of this book is an expansion of that idea. It sets
out to examine the various types of literary creation,
and illustrates from the study of certain masterpieces in
each category, something of what is the unique interest
and essence of each, and the pleasure proper to it.

If it can kindle in the reader the wish to experience
personally that interest and enjoyment, its purpose will
be served.

THE ENJOYMENT OF
LITERATURE

THE LITERATURE OF GOSSIP

I

T is the directness and immediacy of the appeal of let-
ters and journals which make them so dear to the
reader. Perhaps it is because letters, above all forms of
writing, spring from the affections. Their writers are, in
general, single-minded, disinterested folk who pursue
their occupation partly from the simple wish to give
pleasure to others, partly from the sheer love of what
they are doing. They have no thought of fame or
futurity, and none of the conscious, unswerving quest
of the artist for perfection of form. They write at a
particular day and hour for the eyes of a particular
reader, and their creations are the literature of leisure,
of love and of friendship, die literature of intimacy
and of inessentials.

There is, moreover, a feeling of fragility and destruct-
ibility about letters which belongs to no other form of
writing, and which gives them a value of their own.
Books are sturdy things, which soon change the imperma-
nence of manuscript for the persistence of print, and
remain thenceforth invulnerable. But letters can be
hidden for years, for centuries even, at the mercy of a
chance accident, and survive or are destroyed by the
operations of fortune. When Sir William Temple died
in 1699, his private papers, including the letters his wife
had written to him before her marriage, when she was
Dorothy Osborne, went to a grand-daughter living in a
Suffolk village. She in turn left them to her son, who
was vicar of a neighboring village, and at his death,
being childless, he bequeathed his vicarage and its con-

16 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

tents to the husband of his wife's sister. It was this gen-
tleman's son who brought the letters to the notice of
Thomas Peregrine Courtenay, author of a life of Sir
William Temple published in 1836, but the letters
themselves were not published in full until after they
had passed through the hands of six owners, nearly
two hundred and thirty years after the last of them had
been sent by Dorothy Osborne herself to her lover.

All this creates a particular atmosphere about the
reading of letters which we do not feel in the presence
of other forms of writing, but it is, of course, the per-
sonality of the writers and the actual subject matter of
the literature of gossip which is the chief reason for its
direct human appeal. Man is a social animal, a gregarious
creature, passionately interested in his fellow human be-
ings, their lives, their thoughts and feelings, their envi-
ronment, their occupations. And nowhere in literature
can he find the same unashamed interest in these things as
in letters and diaries and journals, which communicate,
indeed, nothing else.

IT is first and foremost the personalities who write the
literature of gossip which engage us, for inevitably the
presence of the author is felt more intimately in this
than in any other form of writing. We know these men
and women as we cannot possibly know the creators of
works of art; we know them as their own intimates knew
them; we know some of them, indeed, as no one knew
them but themselves.

Let us look at some of the portraits. Dorothy Os-
borne, sweet, gentle reserved: * 'tis not that I am
sad . . . but I never appear to be very merry.' And
she had cause enough for sadness. 'Can there be a more
romantic story than ours would make if the conclu-
sion should prove happy?' she writes; and indeed it was

THE LITERATURE OF GOSSIP 17

romantic. It was in 1647 that young William Temple,
the son of an Irish father who sympathized with the
Parliamentary cause in the civil wars, was setting out
for a journey on the continent. On the way to France,
he fell in with the son and daughter of Sir Peter Os-
borne, who was holding Guernsey for the King. They
all stopped at an inn in the Isle of Wight, and there the
hot-headed young Osborne wrote with a diamond some
Royalist sentiments on a window. For this the party was
arrested and brought before the Governor, and Doro-
thy, relying on his chivalry, took the crime on herself,
and in consequence they were all released. Temple fell
in love with the high-spirited girl, and she returned his
feeling, but the outlook seemed very dark. Temple's
father was a keen Cromwellian and Sir Peter Osborne
an equally keen Royalist. Both fathers had other views
for their children, and it was not until seven years later
that all obstacles were overcome and they could marry.
Dorothy's letters date from December, 1652, to
October, 1654. During all that time she is at Chick-
sands Priory in Bedfordshire, nursing her invalid fa-
ther, suffering the constant jealous rages of her brother,
dismissing suitor after suitor, and entertaining dull
visitor after dull visitor. Nothing could be quieter than
her life. She describes a typical day in it to her lover.

You ask me how I pass my time here. ... I rise in
the morning reasonably early, and before I am ready I
go round the house till I am weary of that, and then
into the garden till it grows too hot for me. About ten
o'clock I think of making me ready, and when that's
done, I go into my father's chamber; from thence to
dinner. . . , After dinner we sit and talk. . . . The
heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and
about six or seven o'clock I walk out into a common
that lies hard by the house, where a great many young
wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade

18 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

singing of ballads. ... I talk to them, and find they
want nothing to make them the happiest people in the
world, but the knowledge that they are so. Most com-
monly, when we are in the midst of our discourse, one
looks about her, and spies her cows going into the corn,
and then away they all run as if they had wings at
their heels. I, that am not so nimble, stay behind: and
when I see them driving home their cattle, I think 'tis
time for me to retire too. When I have supped, I go into
the garden, and so to the side of a small river that runs
by it, where I sit down and wish you with me. ... I
sit there sometimes till I am lost with thinking. . . .\

There are many flashes of comedy in the letters:
scenes where smuggled letters reach her from her lover,
scenes of quarrels and reconciliations between herself
and her young brother, and delicious pictures of Cousin
Molle, 'so nice and cautious about himself,' with his
imaginary dropsies and quartan agues. But the main
picture is a sorrowful one. A picture of a sad-eyed,
quiet girl, so distrustful of good-fortune: 'you could
fancy a perfect happiness, you say; that is not much,
many people do so; but I never heard of anybody that
had it more than in fancy.' She is indeed almost puritan
in her feeling. She believes that happiness in this world
'might endanger one forgetting the next,' and when she
comes in from a party expecting a letter from Temple,
and finds none, she thinks it is a just punishment for
having been too much pleased in a company where he
was not. Even when the marriage is actually arranged,
she dares not believe in her future. 'Dear, shall we ever
be happy, think you? Ah, I dare not hope it.' Our own
knowledge of the future that was in store for her lends
an added poignancy to her fearfulness and distrust: for
she had nine children, seven of whom died in infancy,
while the adored daughter who grew into childhood
died of the smallpox when she was fourteen, and the

THE LITERATURE OF GOSSIP 19

son who remained evidently inherited her own tend-
ency to acute nervous depression, and drowned him-
self when he was twenty-five, saying he had long been
tired of the burden of his life and now found it insup-
portable.

There could hardly be a greater contrast than beween
the personalities of Dorothy Osborne and Samuel
Pepys. Only six years separate the last of her letters
and the beginning of the diary: they belong to the same
world, and how fully they illustrate the folly of gen-
eralizing about the character of an age! After her mar-
riage Dorothy Osborne might well have joined the
aristocracy of the court, of whom the snobbish, middle-
class Pcpys so dearly loved to gossip. Perhaps indeed she
did, but her London could never have been Pepys's
London. Her smooth, gracious, quiet nature could
never have touched life at the same variety of points
as the many-faceted curiosity of Pepys. How he loves
life! He might have exclaimed with Stevenson:

The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Nothing is too trivial to interest him: he likes to cram
every moment of existence full to the brim. He is 'might-
ily pleased' by such a wide diversity of experiences;
whether it is watching the Duke of York playing with
his little girl 'just like an ordinary private father of a
child,' or sitting up all night to see a comet, or watching
a murderer executed, or listening to the nightingales in
Vauxhall, or gazing at a great many fine women
through his 'perspective glass' in church, or being made
a Justice of the Peace, or seeing a watch taken to pieces
and put together again, or going behind the scenes at
the playhouse with 'that baggage, Mrs. Knepp' and see-
ing 'the tiring rooms and machines,' or studying Boyle's
hydrostatics, or receiving a letter addressed Samuel

20 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

Pepys Esquire, or meeting his old Aunt James, 'a poor
religious, well-meaning good soul, talking of nothing
but God Almighty, and that with so much innocence
that mightily pleased me.'

We watch him for ten years, kindly, amorous, stingy,
superficial, working very hard at his office, eating enor-
mous meals at home, rushing about London in every
leisure moment, to the coffee-house, to the play, to the
Royal Society, to the shipyards; playing on his flageolet
and singing songs with anyone he can find to hold a
part; regularly making ridiculous vows against wine and
women, and breaking them just as regularly; casting up
his accounts with the delight of the self-made man stead-
ily increasing his income; flying into passions with his
wife, and making it up again; having generous impulses
towards giving her clothes and jewels, and generally
putting them by from motives of economy; and finally,
on May 3ist, 1669, writing for the last time in the
series of little brown notebooks, writing that final
entry which tells that his eyes are so bad that he cannot
write more for fear of going blind.

Twenty years later, in 1689, when Sir William and
Lady Temple had retired to Moor Park in Surrey, a
young Irishman of twenty-two, whose mother was a
distant connection of Lady Temple, came to live with
them as Sir William's secretary. His name was Jonathan
Swift. Temple's sister, Lady Giffard, who lived with
them, had as companion a certain Mrs. Johnson, and her
daughter Esther, then eight years old, was to become
famous later under the name of Stella. Swift left Moor
Park in 1694 when he was twenty-seven, took orders,
and was appointed minister to a church in the north of
Ireland. Two years later, however, he returned to Moor
Park and continued his secretarial duties, acting at the
same time as tutor to Esther Johnson, now fifteen, be-
tween whom and himself a warm friendship grew up.

THE LITERATURE OF GOSSIP 21

On Sir William Temple's death in 1699, Swift was ap-
pointed to the church of Laracor, near Dublin. Temple
had left a little money and property in Ireland to Esther
Johnson, and Swift, eager no doubt for her society,
and knowing that living was considerably cheaper in
Ireland than in England, persuaded her and her friend
Rebecca Dingley to come and settle there. They moved
in 1701, when Swift was thirty-four and Stella twenty,
and lived there until 1710 when Swift came to London
with the intention of remaining a few weeks, and
stayed two and a half years.

During those years he wrote what is now known as
The Journal to Stella (of which there will be more to
say later), and during the same years Lady Mary
Pierrepoint, buried most of the time in the country at
her father's house in Nottinghamshire, was carrying on a
very lively correspondence with Mr. Edward Wortley
Montagu, which ended in their eloping together on
August 1 6th, 1712. It was not a happy marriage. Mr.
Wortley Montagu seems to have been a very unattractive
character, narrow-minded and self-complacent, stingy
and suspicious. We see him very clearly when, during his
embassy at Constantinople, his over-curious wife rashly
tried the effect of the miraculous Balm of Mecca on her
complexion.

I had a present of a small quantity of the best sort,
and with great joy applied it to my face, expecting some
wonderful effect to my advantage. The next morning
the change indeed was wonderful; my face was swelled
to a very extraordinary size, and all over as red as my
Lady B's. It remained in this lamentable state three
days, during which you may be sure I passed my time
very ill. I believed it would never be otherwise; and to
add to my mortification, Mr. Wortley reproached my
indiscretion without ceasing.

No doubt Mr. Wortley had his trials too. His wife

22 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

was indiscreet and undignified, and an inveterate and
irresponsible gossip; but she wrote some of the best
letters in the world. Dr. Johnson declared that it was
the one book, which he did not consider obligatory,
which he read all through, in his whole life. In these
letters, stretching over more than fifty years, she changes
before us from a clever, high-spirited and affectionate
girl, to a shrewd, cynical, calculating woman of the
world, and thence into the most wise, witty and
warm-hearted of mothers and grandmothers. She exiled
herself from England when she was fifty, and found
an ideal spot in which 'to while away an idle life in
great tranquillity' in Gottolengo, a few miles from
Brescia. There she had an old palace, and about a mile
from it, a garden and a 'dairy house.' She spends her
life actively engaged there, or in tending her poultry,
bees and silkworms; she teaches the country people
around how to make English butter and French rolls,
custards, mince-pies and plum puddings; she rides,
walks and fishes; finds wrinkles 'mortifying,' so adopts
the very logical solace of never using a mirror; and is so
full of vitality that when, at the age of sixty, she comes
in at ten o'clock from twenty miles on horseback, and
finds a box of books has arrived from England, she
opens it, and sits up all night reading Fielding's Joseph
Andrews.

Her philosophy is that ripe and vigorous rationalism
which sees the art of living in making the most of the
present, in not regretting the past, and in not fearing
the future. A true daughter of the eighteenth century,
she sees the greatest need of the world to be the growth
of common sense, that quality of mature sanity whose
lack permits of all the human weaknesses she partic-
ularly deplores what she calls 'the quackery of
churches/ the 'palpable folly of warfare' ('fully as
senseless as the boxing of schoolboys') , political hypoc-

THE LITERATURE OF GOSSIP 23

risy, the credulous use of 'universal medicines,' and
the foolishness of parents: Ve mothers should take
example of the innocuous inhabitants of the air; when
their young are fledged, they are delighted to see them
fly and peck for themselves.'

She came back to England to die, and Horace Wai-
pole, perhaps the best known of all English letter-
writers, said of her, grudgingly, by way of epitaph, 'she
had parts and had seen much.' But Horace Walpole had
always hated her, for she stood for the ideal of life he
always disliked and distrusted. She, like Pepys, loved
life, and wanted as much of it as she could get, while
Horace Walpole remained forever afraid of it, the per-
fect portrait of the complete dilettante. He, like the
Osbornes, and Temples and Lady Mary, came from the
leisured moneyed class, and could spend his life in do-
ing nothing but please himself, and he declares that he
has 'a passion for antiquity and literary amusements/
But it is not true: he never had a real passion for any-
thing, or did anything passionately. 'Born to write,
converse, and live with ease,' he never knew any of the
struggles, despairs or ecstasies of human, or intellectual,
or artistic emotion. We see him in his letters a faithful
and generous friend, a lover of animals and children,
a kind and considerate master, 'partial to all youth,'
strictly honorable in all his dealings, invariably cour-
teous, sincerely sympathetic, but he himself says that
his love for his mother, who died when he was twenty,
was the deepest emotion of his life, and his whole atti-
tude to the Madame du Deffand episode shows his al-
most sick fear of being made, as he thinks, ridiculous,
by being even the recipient of an intense affection. He
is always self-conscious, always wondering what effect
he is making on his audience, and we can see him to the
life, as he stays as a young man in the country house of
his cousin the Earl of Hertford.

24 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

You cannot imagine how astonished a Mr. Seward, a
learned clergyman, was, who came to Ragley while I
was there. Strolling about the house, he saw me first
sitting on the pavement of the lumber room with Louis,
all over cobwebs, and dirt, and mortar: then found me
in his own room on a ladder, writing on a picture; and
half an hour afterwards lying on the grass in the court,
with the dogs and the children, in my slippers and
without my hat. He had had some doubt whether I was
the painter or the factotum of the family; but you
would have died at his surprise when he saw me walk
into dinner, dressed, and sit by Lady Hertford. Lord Lyt-
tleton was there, and the conversation turned on litera-
ture: finding me not quite ignorant added to the par-
son's wonder: but he could not contain himself any
longer, when, after dinner, he saw me go to romps and
jumping with the two boys: he broke out to my Lady
Hertford, and begged to know what sort of man I
really was, for he had never met with anything of the
kind.

He never changes very much during the next fifty-
odd years. We revel in the vivid social and political and
literary interest of what he writes, constantly we like him
for this or that trait in his nature, but throughout all
the letters, in spite of their frequent charm, their wit,
their historical interest, we feel that we are in the com-
pany of a man who is too often explaining his nature
ever to be really natural: a man who never laughed
really heartily, or grieved really deeply, or had any
emotion deeply stirred in him throughout his whole
existence. Macaulay dubbed him f a wretched fribble,'
and though he is far more than that, there is something
meager and narrow in his nature, something which
made him incapable of appreciating any robust simplic-
ity of character (he hated Fielding and Johnson), or of
having any whole-hearted enthusiasm for anything or
anybody outside himself. And it is because of all this

THE LITERATURE OF GOSSIP 25

that Horace Walpole is the only writer of first-rate let-
ters that one does not particularly want to have met.

Walpole lived until 1797, and what, one wonders,
would he have thought of a stammering young clerk in
the East India House called Charles Lamb, who was
then twenty-two and had already been earning his liv-
ing for five years? No two men could have lived in cir-
cumstances more unlike. Horace Walpole, stamped
with the hall-mark of Eton and Cambridge, travelled,
dilettante, dandified, never outside the atmosphere of
wealthy ease, and acquainted with every man in the
public eye of his day: and Lamb, the son of a servant,
educated at a charity school, 'defrauded in his young
years of the sweet food of academic institutions/ only
feeling at home in the unfashionable quarters of Lon-
don, miserable at a Lord Mayor's banquet. And no two
men could have been more unlike in personality. Per-
sonal relationships were the warp and woof of Lamb's
life, and how much of an artist he was in affection can
be seen from an early letter of his to Coleridge on the
subject of dedicating his poems to his sister Mary.

It will be unexpected and it will give her pleasure . . .
for there is a monotony in the affections, which people
living together are apt to give in to; a sort of indiffer-
ence in the expression of kindness for each other, which
demands that we should sometimes call to our aid the
trickery of surprise.

There cannot have been many men who have had so
many friends as Lamb: too many, indeed, as he declares
plaintively in a letter to Mrs. Wordsworth.

Never any poor devil was so befriended as I am. Do
you know any poor solitary human that wants that
cordial to life a true friend? I can spare him twenty,
he shall have 'em good cheap. I have gallipots of 'em
genuine balm of cares. . . .

26 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

He found he could never be alone, he was never Charles
Lamb, but always Charles Lamb and Co. But he had
that particular genius, the genius for attracting friends
and for keeping them. He was the only man who
became the friend and did not afterwards become the
enemy of the famous quarrellers of his circle Haz-
litt, Godwin and Leigh Hunt. Indeed he summed up his
philosophy of friendship by saying, 'I never trouble my
head about other people's quarrels.' His first published
letter states that he has paid a bill for Coleridge and
that the money would be 'superfluous' if it were repaid;
and his last letter is one of anxiety lest he should have
lost a friend's book. He had, indeed, the same delicate
artistry in friendship that he had in his relations with
Mary.

Two or three have died within the last two twelve-
months and so many parts of me have been numbed. One
sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy,
and thinks to tell it to this person in preference to every
other: the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly
suited. It won't do for another. . . . Thus one dis-
tributes oneself about: and now for so many parts of
me I have lost the market. Good people, as they are
called, won't serve. I want individuals. I am made up
of queer points, and I want so many answering needles.

Three years before Lamb's death, in 1831, a young
Scottish couple came and stayed with some friends in
Enfield, and they and the Lambs met each other. The
earnest young Scotsman disliked Lamb's 'incurable
levity,' and summed him up as an 'emblem of imbecil-
ity, and yet something too of humane, ingenuous, pa-
thetic, sportfully much-enduring.' Lamb, it is said, was
tipsy, and professing great curiosity about the young
woman's porridge at supper, dipped his spoon into. it.
'Your astonishment at my porridge cannot exceed my

THE LITERATURE OF GOSSIP 27

surprise at your manners,' she rapped out. The quick-
ness was Jane Carlyle's throughout her life, but she was
not often so priggish, and her letters reveal, rather, a
Lady Mary of the nineteenth century. The 'romantic
revival' stood across the hundred years which separated
them in date, and it accounts largely for the differences
in their outlook. Both were quick-witted, rational,
humorous, adventurous and warm-hearted, but Jane
was a reader of Goethe and Schiller and Byron, and she
was the wife of a romantic historian who was also a pas-
sionate moralist. She herself, too, possessed a nervous
system quite abnormal in its sensibility, which had its
effect on her whole personality. It made her exquisitely
sensitive towards those in sickness or distress, but it
created that atmosphere of much ado about next to
nothing which haunts all her descriptions, however
humorous, of her home life: that conviction that the
daily round and die common task at No. 5 Cheyne Row
were so much harder than in any other household; that
servants were much more trying, workmen much more
messy, sewing more wearisome, interruptions more ir-
ritating and paint more smelly. But with it all there is
a delicious spirit about her domestic outbursts, and the
way she 'splashes off* whatever is in her mind: about her
pictures of the furniture standing with its legs in the
air as if in convulsions, of the maid who was 'as clumsy
as a cow in a flower garden/ or of Carlyle so frantic to
get away, and so erratic in his plans, that living with
him has been like living the life of a weathercock in a
high wind blowing from all quarters at once.

'Sincerity is my favorite virtue/ she writes, and she
criticizes life with the greatest vigor and independence,
and has the most refreshing and wholesome intolerance
of any forms of sentimentality and hypocrisy. After
the death of her adored little dog, Nero, when a
thoughtless young mother said 'why not have him

28 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

stuffed?', Jane immediately replied, * Would you stuff
your baby?' She hates the barbarism of a fashionable
wedding, 'all that senseless singing of Te Deum before
the battle has begun,' and will not accept the cant of
saying that happiness may be found in the happiness of
others: 'To eat a beefsteak when one is hungry yields a
satisfaction of a much more positive kind than seeing
one's neighbour eat it.' When her letters first appeared in
print all the reviewers deplored her lack of refinement,
and indeed by the standards of mid-Victorian propriety
she was, as one journalist declared, 'manifestly no lady':
'Why the devil don't you write to me,' she exclaims to
a girl friend, and on a dull visit to the country heads
her letter, in place of address, 'Hell.'

ETHICAL objections have often been made to the publi-
cation of love letters, but human curiosity is stronger
in that matter than any abstract principles, and there
are few of us whose interest is not deeply stirred
by them. Lovers are all alike, yet in life the personality
of each gives a special coloring to his emotion, and the
same coloring lingers in the letters of lovers. Dorothy
Osborne, we feel sure, had the same gentle dignity and
reserve in the actual personal relationship which per-
vades her writing. She is horrified at the romance writ-
ers who make women do the courting: 'it will never
enter my head that 'tis possible any woman can love
where she is not first loved, and much less that if they
should do that, they could have the face to own it.' Yet
when she plans to break her engagement, she feels it
must be an absolute renunciation. She cannot offer
friendship, for, 'to deal freely with you, that were to be-
tray myself, and I find that my passion would quickly
be my master again if J gave it any liberty.' She can hint

THE LITERATURE OF GOSSIP 29

her loneliness in exquisite implication: 'last night I was
in the garden till eleven o'clock. It was the sweetest
night that e'er I saw . . . the jasmine smelt beyond all
perfume. And yet I was not pleased': or she can blend
tenderness and humor in a most charming way:

You ask my thoughts but at one hour; you will think
me bountiful, I hope, when I shall tell you that I know
no hour when you have them not. No, in earnest, my
very dreams are yours, and I have such a habit of think-
ing of you that any other thought intrudes and grows
uneasy to me. I drink your health every morning in a
drench that would poison a horse, I believe, and 'tis
the only way I have to persuade myself to take it.

She is very sweet, but there is a certain remoteness
about her reserve, which makes her an elusive, almost a
vague figure. But Dorothy Wordsworth is a little like
her. There is the same sense of curbed feeling in all she
will allow herself to write in her journal of her pas-
sionate love for her brother.

About ten o'clock, a quiet night. The fire flickers and
the watch Jcks. I hear nothing save the breathing of
my beloved as he now and then pushes his book forward
and turns over a leaf.

Later, William is in Yorkshire with Mary Hutchinson
whom he is to marry, and Dorothy goes to fetch her
letters:

The woman brought me one from William and Mary.
It was a sharp windy night. Thomas Wilkinson came
with me to Barton, and questioned me like a catechiser
all the way. Every question was like the snapping of a
little thread about my heart.

Both these loving women are a little dim in them-
selves; they are so selfless in their love. Dim, certainly,
compared with Swift who, of all lovers who have ever

3 o ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

put pen to paper, has the power to evoke exact outline,
and to call up presences, to set the nerves tingling with
actual sensation, to make the reader see and hear and
touch and taste and smell. We shall never have positive
proof of what were the actual terms of the intimacy
which existed between Swift and Esther Johnson, but
no one can read a page of the journal and not feel the
impassioned affection which is behind its tender raillery
and robust good-fellowship. It is the latter which makes
Swift describe every detail of his doings day by day in
the sure knowledge of her complete sympathy and
interest, but it is the tenderness in his heart which
creates the extraordinary sense of living presences which
haunts his pages. He will write at any time: 'seven
morning: 'tis shaving day, so good morrow, MD, but
don't keep me now, for I can't stay.' (MD probably
stands for 'my dears': he always included Rebecca Ding-
ley in all he wrote). 'Come then, let us see what we
have to say to these saucy brats that will not let us
sleep at past eleven.' We hear the very tones of his
voice: 'it is just as if, methinks, you were here, and I
prating to you, and telling you where I have been.' We
see him, as he describes himself, making up his mouth
as he writes his endearments, as if he were speaking them
to 'the saucy little pretty dear rogues,' and sometimes
he talks out loud 'just as if MD had been by.' When a
letter comes from them, he talks to it too: 'and now let
us come and see what this saucy, dear letter of MD says.
Come out, letter, come out from between the sheets: here
it is underneath, and it will not come out. Come out
again, I say; so there. Here it is. What says Presto to me,
pray? says it ... Hold up your head then, like a good
letter. There.' Or again he will pretend that Stella is play-
ing at being 'a wheedling slut,' and won't let him stop
writing: 'I can nor will stay any longer now: no I
won't, for all your wheedling: no, no, look off, don't

THE LITERATURE OF GOSSIP 31

smile at me and say Pray, pray, Presto, write a little
more.' His affection even gives him a good reason for
writing badly: 'methinks when I write plain, I do not
know how, but we are not alone. A bad scrawl is so
snug.'

Very different in spirit are the letters of poor passion-
ravaged Vanessa, the other woman in that mysterious
triangle. Year after year, for ten years she writes to
him, abasing herself to him, making grovelling entreaties
for any sort of notice, and reiterating over and over
again her undying love for him. 'It is not in the power
of time or accident to lessen the inexpressible passion
which I have for you. . . . Nor is the love I bear you
only seated in my soul; for there is not a single atom of
my frame that is not blended with it.'

To hear that note again we must go to the letters of
Keats to Fanny Brawne, but the only other letter- writer
who approaches that sense of perfect understanding
blended with a wealth of tender absurdity, which char-
acterize the letters of Swift to Stella, is Jane Carlyle.
Tennyson declared very shrewdly that no two people who
chaffed each other as whole-heartedly as the Carlyles
could possibly be unhappily married, and her letters are
full of absurd family jokes as well as of a certain pe-
culiarly glowing quality of affection. *I wish there was a
glass window in my heart that you might look into it.
You can never know by words how much I love you/
She will sign herself banteringly, 'your adorable wife,' or
exclaim suddenly, *I kiss you from ear to ear,' or chal-
lenge attention, 'Now stop! Have you eaten your break-
fast? If not, eat it. The letter will not cool by keeping,
the tea and toast will.'

Horace Walpole is characteristically frank about his
distrust of any close ties, and his refusal of them. 'I am
not at all of Madame du Deffand's opinion, that one
might as well be dead as not love somebody. I think

3 2 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

one had better be dead than love anybody': and again,
'I own I cannot much felicitate anybody that marries
for love. It is bad enough to marry: but to marry where
one loves, ten times worse. It is so charming at first,
that the decay of inclination renders it infinitely more
disagreeable afterwards.' The only other letter-writer
one can match this with at all is Jane Austen. Not that
Jane Austen directly refuses close ties like Walpole. One
suspects that the tie of love simply did not come her
way, that she decided with her own Elizabeth Bennet
that it was 'her business to be satisfied and her temper
to be happy,' and that she made up that very sensible
mind of hers that the complete sympathy between her-
self and her sister should be enough for her. She was
clearly extraordinarily self -sufficient: when she meets a
new acquaintance in the midst of 'the elegant stupidity
of a private party/ she writes: 'Miss Blatchford is agree-
able enough. I do not want people to be too agreeable,
as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.'
And when another young woman has evidently tried to
become intimate with her, she comments, 'Miss Fletcher
and I were very thick, but I am the thinnest of the
two.'

AND as we share the most intimate emotions of these
men and women who write letters, so we see them in
the most practical details of their daily lives. We see
them shopping for each other: Temple buying orange-
flower water for Dorothy Osborne, Swift sending choc-
olate and spectacles to Stella, and so worried because the
box with the 'palsy water' has not reached her; Cow per
asking for 'a genteelish toothpick* to be sent from Lon-
don, or Lady Mary 'bespeaking* a mummy to take home
from Constantinople. We see them spending or saving
their money: Pepys borrowing a book first to see if it

THE LITERATURE OF GOSSIP 33

be worth buying, and going through constant agonies
while his love of economy struggles with his love of
display; Horace Walpole pouring out his wealth to build
and furnish Strawberry Hill; Swift finding his lodging
'plaguy dear* at eight shillings a week, sponging on any-
one for a meal sooner than pay for it himself, haunted
by the thought of Christmas boxes, and groaning at the
bad weather for what it means in coach and chair hire.
We know the very clothes they wore. There is Pcpys in
his fine Camlett cloak with the gold buttons, which cost
him twenty-four pounds, and his wife 'extraordinary
fine in her flower tabby suit,' or Swift complaining that
his caps are all worn out, and that he 'needs a necessary
woman strangely' to do his mending, and is 'as helpless
as an elephant'; or there is Horace Walpole's aunt at the
Court Ball, who 'had adapted her gown to her complex-
ion and chose a silk all broke out in pink blotches,' or
Jane Austen reporting a new evening frock to her sis-
ter: 'the front is sloped round to the bosom and drawn
in, and there is a frill to put on occasionally, when all
one's handkerchiefs are dirty,' or Jane Carlyle economiz-
ing in hard times, with a dyed puce gown and a turned
pelisse, and smartening the whole effect by a bonnet
'with an air,' having a little brown feather nodding,
over the front and a crown pointed like a sugar loaf.
We sec them in scene after scene of comedy. Lady
Mary Wortley, for example, loud in her praises of the
beauty of the scene in a Turkish bath at Constantinople,
but refusing the experience herself:

I excused myself with some difficulty. They being all
so earnest in persuading me, I was at last forced to open
my shirt, and shew them my stays; which satisfied them
very well, for, I saw, they believed I was so locked up in
that machine, that it was not in my power to open
it; which contrivance they attributed to my husband.

34 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

Or we see Horace Walpole overhearing the beautiful
young Duchess of Graf ton (one of the Gunning sisters)
confiding innocently to old George II that her greatest
ambition was to see a coronation; or Jane Carlyle all in
a flutter about the goose on their Scots farm.

Did you ever watch any hatching thing? ... I have
a goose sitting on five eggs a rather flighty sort of
character quite a goose of the world in fact, who
from time to time drives me to the brink of despair by
following her pleasures whole hours with the other
geese, to the manifest danger of cooling her eggs. I hover
about the nest during these long absences with a solici-
tude quite indescribable, and it will end, I believe, in
my sitting down on the eggs myself.

There is Lamb dragged unwillingly to call on the
blue-stocking lady called Miss Benje, sitting dismally
partaking of tea and macaroons, and trying to discuss
Miss Hannah More's views on education and whether
Pope was a poet: or Jane Austen being very little of a
success at a dance, l l was not very much in request.
People were rather apt not to ask me till they could not
help it': or Fitzgerald trying to teach the duet O that
we tivo were maying to two ladies in his Suffolk village,
and commenting, 'they would sing nicely if they had
voices and were taught.' Or in contrast to these there
are the most moving moments of pathos: that heart-
breaking note written by Robert Greene on his deathbed
to the wife he had betrayed and forsaken:

Doll, I charge thee, by the love of our youth and by
my soules rest, that thou wilt see this man paide; for if
he and his wife had not succoured me, I had died in
the streets:

or the equally heart-breaking endorsement on the note
Dorothy Temple's son left behind when he drowned
himself: 'Child's paper he writ before he killed himself:

THE LITERATURE OF GOSSIP 35

or those simple words in which Swift implies something
of what Stella's death meant to him:

This is the night of the funeral, which my sickness
will not suffer me to attend. It is now nine at night;
and I am removed into another apartment, that I may
not see the light in the church, which is just over against
the window of my bedchamber.

FINALLY there is the picture of the past we get from
the literature of gossip, that humanizing of history
which comes from reading of it almost unawares, from
finding it side by side with an account of the Sunday
dinner and the price of tobacco, with passionate affec-
tion or a family joke. It may give an ill-proportioned
and theoretically unsound view of the progress of Eng-
lish society, politics and literature from the seventeenth
to the nineteenth centuries to study it in the pages of
the gossip writers, but what is lost in comprehensiveness
of view is gained in vividness, and I am very sure that
it is the pictures of the letter-writers that live longest
in the memory.

It is from them that we learn, without taking thought
about them, of the manners of other ages: in them that
we read, for instance, with a certain involuntary shud-
der, of how a cultivated, civilized man like John Evelyn
would go and watch a man being tortured, or of how
the body of Guiscard, the spy who stabbed Lord Har-
ley, in 1710, was 'pickled in a trough* and exhibited for
twopence. The fire of London becomes an immediate
reality as we read in Pepys how the pigeons would not
leave their homes and fluttered round the burning
houses until their very wings were singed; and so does
the South Sea Bubble, as we hear of Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu's unlucky speculations. Or the size of early

3 6 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

eighteenth-century London is suddenly realized as Swift
tells Stella of walking through the sweet-smelling hay-
fields between London and Chelsea, just as the size of
the seventeenth-century appetite is realized as Pepys jots
down the menu of the dinner he provides for his friends
on January 2 6th, 1659: 'a dish of marrow bones; a leg
of mutton; a loin of veal; a dish of fowl, three pullets,
and two dozen of larks all in a dish; a great tart, a
neat's tongue, a dish of anchovies; a dish of prawns and
cheese. 5 How odd it seems to hear from Horace Walpole
that the first time a company of aristocratic amateurs
performed a play at Drury Lane Theatre, the rage to
see it was so great that the House of Commons ad-
journed at three o'clock in the afternoon so that all
the members might attend. And how romantic it is to
find the names of the great, and descriptions of them
in among the lightest of gossip and the most intimate
of personal details to hear Horace Walpole's opinion
of 'that hyena in petticoats' Mary Wollstonecraft, or
how Charles James Fox, after racing at Newmarket all
day and gambling at Almack's all night, went straight
to the House of Commons and held it spellbound for
two hours by his brilliant oratory. Queen Anne becomes
as pathetic as the humblest of shy hostesses as she stands
holding a drawing-room, and looking round 'with her
fan in her mouth, and once a minute said about three
words to some that were nearest to her'; and Coleridge
ceases to be a damaged archangel or 'a steam engine of
a hundred horses power, with the boiler burst,' and
becomes instead a gloriously comic figure as Lamb de-
scribes his own method of dealing with his friend's
eloquence. He met Coleridge, he says, one day when he
was going to work.

And in spite of my assuring him that time was pre-
cious, he drew me within the door of an unoccupied

THE LITERATURE OF GOSSIP 37

garden by the road-side, and there, sheltered from ob-
servation by a hedge of evergreens, he took me by the
button of my coat, and closing his eyes, commenced an
eloquent discourse, waving his right hand gently, as the
musical words flowed in an unbroken stream from his
lips. I listened entranced; but the striking of a church
clock recalled me to a sense of duty. I saw it was of no
use to attempt to break away, so taking advantage of
his absorption in his subject, I, with my penknife,
quietly severed the button from my coat, and decamped.
Five hours afterwards, in passing the same garden on my
way home, I heard Coleridge's voice, and on looking in,
there he was, with closed eyes the button in his fingers
and his right hand gracefully waving, just as when I
left him. . . .

The difficulty about writing of the literature of gos-
sip is that there is no end to the subject. There is no art
of letter-writing, and a discussion of it as a form could
only be complete if it included every individual whose
letters have been published. For the only art the letter-
writer practises is the art of being himself. He is simply
a human being, writing of his occupations, his thoughts,
his feelings, and of those of his fellow creatures. And
all that the reader need bring to the study of the litera-
ture of gossip is his natural inquisitiveness about his
neighbors' affairs; the common capacity we all have to
prick up our ears at tattle about other folk whether
it is to learn how Margaret Paston in the fifteenth cen-
tury turned her daughter out of the house for loving
the bailiff, or to listen five hundred years later to what
Mr. D. H. Lawrence thought about Mr. Middleton
Murry, or to what Mr. Alexander Woollcott thinks
about Miss Dorothy Parker.

THE ESSAY

T

JLHE essay is the simplest of all forms of literature,
but with it we enter that world where we shall remain
throughout the rest of this book, the world of the
conscious art of writing. From the lowest to the highest,
from the simplest to the most complex kinds of litera-
ture, we shall find henceforth that the enjoyment of it
is always twofold. There is the pleasure we receive from
the conscious stimulus of certain recognizable parts of
our being: to our curiosity about the stories and situ-
ations of other human beings, to our emotions, to our
intellectual faculties, to our moral nature, to our senses.
The pleasure of sharing the adventures of Robinson
Crusoe, of meeting Elizabeth Bennet, of being stirred
by Milton or enraptured by the sheer music of The Eve
of St. Agnes. Here we know clearly what it is that
pleases us; we recognize both the cause and the effect of
the sense of satisfaction. But in the other kind of
pleasure which literature creates, we arc clearly con-
scious only of its effect. Form works upon the conscious-
ness as a whole; it stimulates the consciousness as a
whole; it satisfies it as a whole. If it is there, the sensitive
reader recognizes it at once without analysis: the whole
thing is 'right,' and the reason of its rightncss is not
questioned. But if perfection of form is absent, if the
thing is 'wrong,' the reader is conscious that something
vital is lacking. Detached faculties may still receive
pleasure, human curiosity may be provoked, the mind
quickened, the senses stirred, but that fusion of all
faculties into one general sense of satisfaction in which

f THE ESSAY 39

the whole man is involved, is not there. Just as in a bal-
let the individual movements may be supple, the in-
dividual poses superb, the individual dexterity amaz-
ing, the decor perfect, but if the whole has not been
bound together, fused, unified by one general spirit of
rhythm, the harmony is not complete. What distin-
guishes the real artist from the amateur, says Goethe, is
that power of execution which creates, forms and con-
stitutes the whole.

WHAT is an essay? It is impossible not to agree with
J. B. Priestley that the simplest and safest definition of
the essay is that it is the kind of composition produced
by an essayist. The term is indeed so wide that it is
meaningless. If we try to bring Locke's Essay on the
Human Understanding and Lamb on Old China within
the limits of a single definition it obviously cannot be
done. The essay may be a dissertation, a piece of rheto-
ric, an argument, a discussion. It may deal with a re-
ligious, economic, historical, sociological, scientific or
philosophical subject, or any other kind of subject. But
it is clear that there is something very much narrower
in definition which we really mean when we speak of
the essay in any general discussion of literature. We
mean a form of writing which aims definitely at cer-
tain literary values: that is, it aims at using language
as a medium to present life in a way of its own.

Of all forms of literature, the essay is the one which
least calls for the use of long words. The principle which
controls it is simply that it should give pleasure; the
desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf
is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay
must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a
spell with its first word, and we should only wake re-
freshed with its last. In the interval we may pass

40 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

through the most varied experiences of amusement, sur-
prise, interest, indignation . . . but we must never be
roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its cur-
tain across the world. /

*So great a feat is seldom accomplished,' Virginia
Woolf continues, 'though the fault may well be as much
on the reader's side as on the writer's. Habit and
lethargy have dulled his palate.' This may be so, and yet,
if the truth must be told, the reader has a good deal of
excuse, for as a student he has generally been surfeited
with essays, and unless the essay is superlatively good
it is the dullest form of all reading. A soliloquy is a
most difficult form to sustain, and the essay is all solilo-
quy. The essayist has so few baits with which to catch
and hold the reader's attention. He has no story to
arouse his curiosity and no rhyme to charm his ear: his
space is so limited that he has but little room for move-
ment, for changes of tone and pace. He cannot afford
to make any mistakes. If he write tediously or carelessly
or foolishly, the essay at once capsizes and sinks; the
pleasure cruise is at an end, the reader is bored.

It is because of this razor edge between charm and
boredom which so many essays balance on, that we
might quarrel with Virginia Woolf's declaration that
the essay should never arouse us, and declare instead
that on occasions it docs and should. Perhaps this is only
true if we admit oratory and rhetoric into essay-writing,
but if speeches be written to be read as well as to be
heard, it is difficult to see how they can be excluded
from this whole class of writings. Burke's speeches are
superb essays, and so is Milton's Areopagitica, that great
plea for the liberty of speech which, indeed, for the de-
light of direct intellectual and emotional and moral
stimulus, in some of the most supple and sonorous
cadences in the English language, remains unsurpassed.

THE ESSAY 41

If I were to choose one sentence in the English language
which is to myself the most kindling in its passion, and
its idea and its expression, it would be one from the
Areopagitica.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister'd virtue, un-
exercis'd and unbreath'd, that never sallies out and sees
her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that
immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and
heat.

The quality of that is the quality of the whole, and as
a further taste of it, I quote the famous passage on the
life of books.

I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in
the Church and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye
how Books demean themselves as well as men; and there-
after to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on
them as malefactors: For Books are not absolutely dead
things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be
as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay,
they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and ex-
traction of that living intellect that bred them. I know
they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as
those fabulous Dragon's teeth; and being sown up and
down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet
on the other hand, unless wariness be us'd, as good al-
most kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man
kills a reasonable creature, God's Image; but he who de-
stroys a good Book, kills reason itself, kills the Image of
God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden
to the Earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood
of a master spirit, embalm'd and treasur'd up on pur-
pose to a life beyond life.

It is true, however, that the class of writings which
we usually mean when we speak of essays, does not have
the rousing and animating quality of Burke or Milton.
Its aim is much milder, its achievement quite different.

42 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

The supreme art of the essay proper, that special type of
writing which was originated and invented by Mon-
taigne, and dates from the first publication of his
Estates in March, 1571, is to communicate personality.
The essay (the word was used by Montaigne simply to
denote experiments in a new form of writing) , is the
most direct form of prose communication between
author and reader: it is deliberate egotism and self-
revejation. Montaigne wrote the epigraph for all essay-
ists,Vthese are fancies of my own, by which I do not
pretend to discover things, but to lay open myself.' JAs
Lamb said of him, 'his own character pervades the
whole, and binds it sweetly together,' and it is signifi-
cant that Coleridge said of Lamb himself, 'Charles
Lamb has more totality and individuality of character
than any other man I know.'

That is the character the perfect essayist requires. He
says with Sir Thomas Browne: 'the world that I regard
is myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I
cast my eye on. For the other I use it but like my globe,
and turn it round sometimes for my recreation.' The
novelist or the dramatist requires to be detached from
his own personality. He may be David Copperfield or
Jane Eyre or Hamlet, but he must also be Dick Swivel-
ler or Paul Emmanuel or Lady Macbeth. But the essay-
ist must never be more than one character. The person-
ality with which he writes may not be entirely his own,
but it must be a complete personality. Elia is not the
whole of Charles Lamb, nor the Spectator the whole
of Joseph Addison, but they are each a completely
recognizable person. We can walk round them and feel
we know them in the most actual and tangible way.
And we must have this sense of intimacy with the
essay-writer, it is the essential of his peculiar and diffi-
cult art. He must always be the same person, and we
must never be out of his company. Whatever other per-

THE ESSAY 43

sonality or situation or circumstance he presents, what-
ever book or picture or actor he is discussing, he is at
pains to remind us all the time that it is bis vision of
them we are sharing. The main interest is always shifted
subtly from the subject of the essay, to the kind of
mind and being the personality which is writing of
that subject. Creative egotism is the secret of the es-
sayist, an egotism which appears, in the hands of an
artist, as if it were the most simple and natural thing in
the world, while in reality it is never successful unless
it is presented with supreme skill. Just as his subject
matter appears desultory and meandering, and is really
the most carefully conceived and constructed of unities.

Alexander Smith, a minor writer of the mid-nine-
teenth century, who wrote a good essay, On the writing
of essays, in a volume called Dreamtborpe, says that the
essay resembles the lyric in that both are molded by
some central mood, whimsical, serious or satirical. 'Give
the mood, and the essay, from the first sentence to the
last, grows round it as a cocoon grows round the silk-
worm.' This is a good image of the essayist's art, and is
a better starting point for the illustrating of essays than
a mere history of the subject. But a few chronological
landmarks are perhaps helpful.

Montaigne died in 1 592, and the first ten of Bacon's es-
says appeared in print five years later, and were the first
essays to be published in England. He increased the num-
ber to thirty-eight in the edition of 1612, and to fifty-
eight in the final edition of 1625. But although Bacon
must have taken the idea of the essay from Montaigne,
nothing could be more different than the 'moods' from
which each of the two spins his thread. Montaigne must
always remain the perfect example of the essayist tem-
perament sympathetic, humorous, unexpected, lovable,
passionately curious in his search after psychological
truth while Bacon takes this new instrument for writ-

44 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

ing of the world as it is seen through the eyes of a temper-
ament, and manages to turn it into something completely
inhuman. Montaigne is a warm flesh and blood figure, sit-
ting at ease at his study writing-table underneath the
beam on which is carved 7 do not understand; I pause;
I examine. Bacon is a chilly statue of Wisdom, com-
menting on human life in the manner of a great judge
in his robes and ermine, with the greatest brilliance and
the greatest detachment. The subject is always perfectly
planned and presented, but it is all entirely external and
general. It has all been thought, never felt. Take the
opening of his essay On Studies as a good example.

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for
ability. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and
retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability,
is in the judgment and disposition of business; For ex-
pert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars
one by one: but the general counsels, and the plots and
marshalling of affairs come best from those that are
learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to
use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make
judgment wholly by their rules is the humour of a
scholar: They perfect nature, and are perfected by ex-
perience: for natural abilities are like natural plants,
they need pruning by study; and studies themselves do
give forth directions too much at large, except they be
bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies,
simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for
they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom with-
out them and above them, won by observation. Read
not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take
for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to
weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others
to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and di-
gested.

It is not thus that Montaigne or Milton or Lamb talk
about books, and it is pretty dry stuff in spite of its ex-

THE ESSAY 45

cellent good sense and the excellent setting of its words.
It was not until Cowley's essays were published in
1 668 that the tone of Montaigne crept into the English
essay. Cowley's talent is a small one, his personality is
not interesting or varied enough to bear very much ex-
ploitation of it: the vein is very soon worked out, but
what there is of it is gold. In his essay Of Myself there
is the true flavor that intimacy and warmth of spirit,
that fresh simplicity and apparent artlessness. It creates
its own charm as it flows along: it is nothing, and yet it
is delightful.

It is a hard and nice subject for a man to write of him-
self; it grates his own heart to say anything of dis-
paragement, and the reader's ears to hear anything of
praise for him. There is no danger from me of offend-
ing him in this kind; neither my mind, nor my body,
nor my fortune allow me any materials for that vanity.
It is sufficient for my own contentment that they have
preserved me from being scandalous, or remarkable on
the defective side. ... As far as my memory can re-
turn back into my past life, before I knew or was capa-
ble of guessing what the world, or glories, or business of-
it were, the natural affections of my soul gave me a
secret bent of aversion from them, as some plants are
said to turn away from others, by an antipathy im-
perceptible to themselves and inscrutable to man's un-
derstanding. Even when I was a very young boy at
school, instead of running away on holidays and play-
ing with my fellows, I was wont to steal from them and
walk into the fields, either alone with a book, or with
some one companion, if I could find any of the same
temper. . . . That I was then of the same mind as I
am now (which I confess I wonder at myself) may ap-
pear by the latter end of an ode which I made when I
was but thirteen years old, and which was then printed
with many other verses. The beginning of it is boyish,
but of this part which I here set down, if a very little
were corrected, I should hardly now be much ashamed.

46 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

Books should, not business, entertain the light,
And sleep, as undisturbed as death, the night.

My house a cottage, more
Than palace, and should fitting be
To all my use, no luxury.

My garden painted o'er

With Nature's hand, not Art's; and pleasures yield,
Horace might envy in his Sabine field.

Thus would I double my life's fading space,
For he that runs it well twice runs his race.

And in this true delight,
These unbought sports, this happy state,
I would not fear, nor wish my fate,

But boldly say each night,
To-morrow let my sun his beams display
Or in clouds hide them I have lived today.

You may see by it I was even then acquainted with
the poets (for the conclusion is taken out of Horace),
and perhaps it was the immature and immoderate love
of them which stamped first, or rather engraved, these
characters in me. They were like letters cut into the
bark of a young tree, which with the tree still grow
proportionably. But how this love came to be produced
in me so early is a hard question. I believe I can tell the
particular little chance that filled my head first with
such chimes of verse as have never since left ringing
there. For I remember when I began to read, and to
take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my
mother's parlour (I know not by what accident, for she
herself never in her life read any book but of devotion) ,
but there was wont to lie Spenser's works; this I hap-
pened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with
the stories of the knights, and giants, and monsters, and
brave houses, which I found everywhere there (though
my understanding had little to do with all this) ; and
by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and the dance

THE ESSAY 47

of the numbers, so that I think I had read him all over
before I was twelve years old.

Some of the essays of Sir William Temple (Dorothy
Osborne's husband) have this same note, but it was the
coming of the periodical newspaper which really estab-
lished the essay in popularity. It created a market for
it, which it has never lost, so that it was not only aris-
tocratic dilettantes who could afford to practise it; and
it developed that easy, friendly manner which comes
from the essayist's sense that he is writing for a familiar
circle of readers who are in sympathy with him. It also
encouraged the essayist to write on the subjects which
make the best essays incidents of daily life about him,
the immediate, the personal, the tangible, not the ab-
stract and indefinite. On April izth, 1709, the first
number of the Tatler y one little folded sheet of paper,
appeared at the breakfast tables of the aristocracy and
in the coffee-houses of the town, and from then on-
wards the eighteenth century was deluged with essays.
To our modern taste, the majority of these essays are
completely unreadable, except in small extracts, and in-
deed, the capacity of the reading public of the eighteenth
century for swallowing pills in jam is one of the most
surprising things about it. Why, with the example of
that century before us, we continue to regard the Vic-
torian age as the great age of moral lessons in literature,
is a mystery. We are apt to think of the eighteenth cen-
tury as a gay and wicked age, though it is difficult to
know why. Perhaps because its greatest writers were
satirists and its novelists much concerned about the
sexual impulse in young men and the consequent danger
of young women losing their virtue. But at no time did
the daily and weekly reading of the majority concern
itself so much with the moral conduct of life as it did in

4 8 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

the eighteenth century. If Steele gives a charming de-
scription of a happy family, he will follow it up with a
paper about the death of the wife and mother, and a
discussion of the ethics of Loss. If he describes his club
it is to conclude how the garrulity of old age should
be countered by storing the mind with real knowledge
and observation. He is quite distressed when he simply
cannot think of any serious moral lesson to be learned
from his ramble between Richmond and London, and
has to fall back on a rather frivolous one:

When I came to my chambers, I writ down these
minutes; but was at a loss what instruction I should
propose to my reader from the enumeration of so many
insignificant matters and occurrencies; and I thought
it of great use, if they learn with me to keep their
minds open to gratification, and ready to receive it from
anything it meets with.

Even the Sir Roger de Coverley papers, the great artis-
tic achievement of the eighteenth-century essay, are apt
to be interrupted by Addison's insistence on pointing
the moral, and the same is true of Goldsmith. The essay
became the vehicle of platitude rather than of experi-
ence: the essayists will not let themselves be themselves
because they are all so busy feeling they must be the
Censor. And as a result, though it would be easy to
make an anthology of first-rate passages from the
eighteenth-century essayists, it is not surprising that the
heart of the average student sinks when he is told that
if he wants to write good prose he must give his days
and nights to the study of Addison. Addison is a very
dull writer, and the volumes of the Tatlcr and the
Spectator are dull volumes, and there are many equally
good writers of prose.

THE ESSAY 49

AND yet it is not really because the eighteenth century
is so concerned about problems of conduct that it is
dull: it is because of the way in which the writers treat
of them. We are all, as a matter of fact, interested in
ethical questions and in reading about them, but we are
not interested in having a purely conventional and gen-
eral code of social and personal morality applied to
every subject. It is that which stifles the individuality
which is the breath of life to the essayist. Dr. Johnson's
opinion of Addison fits many more than Addison: 'he
thinks justly, but he thinks faintly.' There is nothing
vigorous, energetic or personal in the moral values of
these men. If, however, moral feeling be an essential
part of the mood in which the essay is conceived in-
stead of being merely tacked on as an adjunct it be-
comes an essential part of its total quality and effect,
and we would not wish it otherwise. Ethical feeling can
lap us round as securely as any other mood.

It is no longer the fashion now to read Robert Louis
Stevenson. His vogue during his life and immediately
after his early death was so great and glowing that a re-
action was bound to set in. But his popularity will in-
evitably return. He was a second-rate novelist, for his
creative gift was never substantial enough to write great
novels, but he is a first-rate essayist. And the mood of
all, or almost all, of his essays is an ethical one; he spins
its thread around some problem of conduct or some
tenet of his own individual faith. Stevenson had to
struggle all his life with an incurable disease: he did his
work unflinchingly against appalling odds. But the
strange thing about his extraordinarily vivid personality
was that it produced an attitude to life which, instead
of being one of splendid stoical endurance of suffering,

50 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

managed to be one of positive exhilaration. He justifies
life because it is a battle: he loves positive values as
much as Milton: 'To avoid an occasion for our virtues
is a worse degree of failure than to push forward
pluckil)* and make a fall.' It is only over-prudence and
timidity which he finds paralyzing: 'There are some to
whom never to forget their umbrella in a long life, is
a higher and wiser achievement than to go smiling to
the stake.' 'Youthful enthusiasm may be foolish, but it
is better to be a fool than to be dead.'

Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead
wall, or whether we think of it as a vestibule or gym-
nasium, where we wait our turn and prepare our facul-
ties for some more noble destiny; . . . whether we look
justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to
mount into a bath chair as a step towards the hearse;
in each and all of these views and situations there is
but one conclusion possible: that a man should stop his
ears against paralysing terror, and run the race which
is set before him with a single mind. ... As courage
and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good
man's cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence
to recognise our precarious state in life, and the first
part of courage to be not at all abashed before the
fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not
looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin
regret over the past, stamps the man who is well ar-
moured for this world.

Here we are very far removed from the bony conven-
tional morality of the eighteenth century. We are in the
company of a clear-cut, witty, courageous, sensitive
personality, and we are in the presence of an artist in
prose. Stevenson's confession that he learned his craft
by playing 'the sedulous ape' to other writers has some-
times been taken to mean that his own use of language
always remains imitative. Nothing is more untrue. His

THE ESSAY 51

early work is inclined to be a little thin and mannered
and over-ornamented, but his later essays such essays
as Pidvis et Umbra, The Lantern Bearers or the once
famous A Christmas Sermon are the work of a complete
and warmly-colored personality, communicating itself
in a forthright, strong and warmly-colored prose. They
lay us under a spell with the first word, and we wake
refreshed with the last.

THE moods in which the problems of human conduct
are of supreme importance can therefore be the basis of
the essayist's art as much as any other moods. But it is
true that they very seldom do make thoroughly success-
ful essays. If a personality is passionately concerned
with such questions, it is ten to one that his calling will
not be that of an essayist; he will be expressing his per-
sonality in some more immediately practical way. We
may safely say that but for the accident of ill-health
Stevenson would not have been content to write es-
says. The essay which the man of such a temperament
writes is seldom as we say 'pure literature.' It has an
ulterior aim: it seeks to convert or persuade, to argue,
to discuss, to analyze, to explain. It goes over into his-
tory or politics or criticism, like Macaulay or Carlyle or
Arnold. But the pure essayist, as Virginia Woolf says,
seeks only to give pleasure, and we read him with no
ulterior aim ourselves. His own occupations and his own
acquaintance are his subject matter, and we ask for
nothing of more public or general importance.

From very early days, when minor seventeenth-
century writers wrote Characters/ which, in general,
were nothing but wooden descriptions of commonplace
types, the essayist was fond of the character sketch. It
lends itself naturally to the essay, and as we have said,
the Sir Roger papers hold a unique place among early

52 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

essays. Goldsmith did something of the same sort in his
pictures of Beau Tibbs, and Lamb's Captain Jackson is
a little masterpiece in that style. These, however, are all
very simple in their method of presentation, and a more
complex treatment, which is indeed a most masterly il-
lustration of the technique of the essay, is Hazlitt's My
first Acquaintance with Poets. It is a long essay
twenty-five pages in the edition I have of it but once
started upon it, there is no one, I think, who has any
interest in the literary personalities of the early nine-
teenth century, who could possibly want to stop. It
opens without preamble, and we are at once in the at-
mosphere of living presences.

My father was a Dissenting Minister at Wem in
Shropshire; and in the year 1798 . . . Mr. Coleridge
came to Shrewsbury, to succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual
charge of a Unitarian congregation there. He did not
come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to
preach; and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the
coach in a state of anxiety and expectation to look for
the arrival of his successor, could find no one at all an-
swering the description but a round-faced man in a
short black coat (like a shooting-jacket) which hardly
seemed to have been made for him, but who seemed to
be talking at a great rate to his fellow-passengers. Mr.
Rowe had scarce returned to give an account of his
disappointment, when the round-faced man in black
entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject, by
beginning to talk. He did not cease while he stayed; nor
has he since, that I know of. . .

To Hazlitt, Coleridge's talk came as a revelation:

A sound was in my ears as of a Siren's song; I was
stunned, startled with it, as from deep sleep; but I had
no notion then that I should ever be able to express my
admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint al-

THE ESSAY 53

lusion, till the light of his genius shcjfie into my soul,
like the sun's rays glittering in the puddles of the road.
I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a
worm by the wayside, crushed, bleeding, lifeless; but
now, bursting from the deadly bands that

'bound them, With Styx nine times round them/
my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand
their plumes, catch the golden light of other years. My
soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark,
obscure, with longing deep and unsatisfied; my heart,
shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never
found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but
that my understanding also did not remain dumb and
brutish, or at length found a language to express itself,
I owe to Coleridge. But this is not to my purpose.

It is very much to the purpose of the essay, however,
for blended throughout with the sense of the actual
presences of these men of genius in all the glory of their
youth and hope, is the peculiar egotism of Hazlitt him-
self, the conviction that somehow he is the victim of an
unfair fate, and the sense of almost unbearable regret
and wistfulness with which he is looking back and re-
membering.

The scene of the sermon which Coleridge preached,
and Hazlitt listened to, on the following day, follows,
and then they are joined by the presence of Hazlitt's
father, and the three of them sit eating their dinner and
talking together in the' warmest spirit of good fellow-
ship. 'I remember the leg of Welsh mutton and the tur-
nips on the table that day had the finest flavour imagi-
nable.' When Coleridge has to leave, Hazlitt walks six
miles with him on his way and again they talk, and
something of the miracle of Coleridge's talk does take
shape before us, and the magic of his personality as a
young man, and the change, alas, which the years have
brought. All through that winter, the magic dwelt with

54 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

the young Hazlitt. One thought, he says, blotted out
everything, f J was to visit Coleridge in the spring. 9 As
a matter of fact he did not get there till the autumn,
when we walk the journey with him, and get wet at
Tewkesbury, and stop at the inn where he sat up all
night reading Paul and Virginia. The next day he ar-
rived.

The country about Nether Stowey is beautiful, green
and hilly, and near the sea-shore. I saw it but the other
day, after an interval of twenty years, from a hill near
Taunton. How was the map of my life spread out before
me, as the map of the country lay at my feet. In the
afternoon Coleridge took me over to All-Foxden . . .
where Wordsworth lived. . . . Wordsworth himself
was from home, but his sister kept house, and set be-
fore us a frugal repast; and we had free access to her
brother's poems, the Lyrical Ballads, which were still in
manuscript. . . .

In the outset of life (and particularly at this time I
felt it so) our imagination has a body to it. We are in a
state between sleeping and waking, and have indistinct
but glorious glimpses of strange shapes, and there is al-
ways something to come better than what we see. As in
our dreams, the fullness of the blood gives warmth and
reality to the coinage of the brain, so in youth our
ideas are clothed, and fed, and pampered with our good
spirits; we breathe thick with thoughtless happiness,
the weight of future years presses on the strong pulses
of the heart, and we repose with undisturbed faith in
truth and good. As we advance, we exhaust our fund of
enjoyment and of hope. We are no longer wrapped in
lamb's-wool, lulled in Elysium. As we taste the pleasures
of life, their spirit evaporates, the sense palls; and noth-
ing is left but the phantoms, the lifeless shadows of
what has been!

. . . The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol
at Coleridge's cottage. I think I see him now. He an-

THE ESSAY 55

swered in some degree to his friend's description of
him, but was more gaunt and Don Quixote-like. He was
quaintly dressed ... in a brown fustian jacket and
striped pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a
lounge in his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell. There
was a severe, worn pressure of thought about his tem-
ples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw something in objects
more than the outward appearance), an intense high
narrow forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by
strong purpose and feeling, and a convulsive inclina-
tion to laughter about the mouth, a good deal at vari-
ance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of
his face. . . . He sat down and talked very naturally
and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in
his voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tinc-
ture of the northern burr, like the crust on wine. He
instantly began to make havoc of the half of a Cheshire
cheese on the table. . . .

They all went over again to All-Foxden, and we hear
them reading poetry aloud in the open air, and talking
endlessly; and we see them sitting in the low latticed
window, or in the garden, and again talking endlessly,
and we hear that Coleridge likes to compose walking
over uneven ground, or breaking through the strag-
gling branches of a copse wood: whereas Wordsworth
always wrote, if he could, 'walking up and down a
straight gravel path, or in some spot where the con-
tinuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption.'

Then they left Dorothy behind, and set off on a
walking tour down the coast to Lynton, staying in
sweet country inns, and listening to the fisher-folk, and
talking away among themselves as hard as ever. When
they returned, Hazlitt set out for his home again, and
Coleridge for Germany, and the scenes fade out. . . .
For a moment Lamb looks in and makes a remark, and
then the essay ends.

The reader is so caught up and carried along by the

5 6 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

writing, that it is not until the whole is analyzed and
anatomized that we realize the brilliance of the artistry
with which its varied strands are knit together, its
varied emotions fused into a unity of effect. It appeals
to so much of the total human consciousness: to purely
intellectual interests, to dramatic emotions, to the sense
of common curiosity, to reverence and admiration, to
laughter and pity, to eye and ear and physical sensation,
and to the ache in the heart of every human being who
has lost his youth and its dreams.

IT is time to say something of the greatest artist among
English essay-writers Charles Lamb. It would be in-
teresting to work out a comparison between his essay
on Old China and Hazlitt 's My First Acquaintance with
Poefs, and to note in detail the different methods of
two artists, with widely different personalities, dealing
with something of the same sort of theme. Both create
extraordinarily living figures and both intertwine the
past and the present to gain a particular effect. Lamb
writes in a mood of comedy, Hazlitt in one of disil-
lusion; Lamb uses the dramatic method, Hazlitt the de-
scriptive; and each essay is a masterpiece of its kind. But
something more general must be said of Lamb.

I suspect there are times when all readers who do not
regard Lamb as 'Saint Charles' find his exaggerated
'quaintness' irritating; when his description of his own
writings as Villainously prank't in an affected array of
antique modes and phrases/ seems justly to sum up their
weakness; when his so carefully created personality
palls. But these are definitely, I think, some of those oc-
casions when the reader is at fault, when 'habit and
lethargy have dulled his palate.' For to come freshly and
without prejudice to Lamb is to confess that, within the

THE ESSAY 57

limits of the essay, he is perfection. This perfection is
partly the result of a unique temperament, partly the
effect of a unique kind of learning and thinking, and
partly sheer technical mastery of his medium. One great
element in his success is the tangibility, the concreteness
of the world he creates. Lamb is sometimes spoken of as
if he were a shy, elusive, almost dim figure. He was, of
course, shy and retiring in life; he stammered and was
insignificant-looking; he hated publicity and 'occasions.'
But there is no one who is more clearly embodied in his
writing. There the outline of his own figure is clean-
edged, firm and sure, projected in the round, unlike the
figure of anybody else; significant, unique.

In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I
set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay
my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel.
I am not content to pass away, 'like a weaver's shuttle/
Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the un-
palatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried
with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to
eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny.
I am in love with this green earth; the face of town
and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the
sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle
here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I
am arrived; I, and my friends: to be no younger, no
richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by
age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the
grave. Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet
or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My
household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not
rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek
Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me.

Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and
summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the
delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the
.cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversa-

58 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

tions, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself
do these things go out with life?

Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when
you are pleasant with him?

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I
part with the intense delight of having you (huge arm-
fuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if
it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intui-
tion, and not linger by this familiar process of reading?

We know Lamb as perhaps we know no other writer
of essays. The precision and clarity and grace of his pres-
entation of himself delight the sensuous imagination
everywhere. We have glimpses of the childhood of some
of the other essayists, of Cowley, of Steele, of Ha/Iitt,
but we know none of them as we know the child Elia.
We see him turning over the pages o"f the old illustrated
Bible, putting his fingers through the picture of the
Ark, and shuddering over the Witch of Endor calling
up Samuel: we see him at the rapture of his first play,
or reading Cowley in the hot window seat of the store-
room at Blakesmoor, with the hum and flapping of the
solitary wasp; we know him wandering in the green
lanes at Mackery End, or as a schoolboy bathing all day
long, like an otter, in the New River at Newington.

It is with the same clear outline that the reader sees
his relations and friends, his own adult life, and indeed,
everything his pen touches Captain Jackson helping
himself cheerfully to cheese-rind, or Mrs. Battle sitting
bolt upright with her cards; Bridget Elia slicing French
beans, or the tired little chimney-sweep asleep on the
freshly laundered aristocratic sheets. But the extreme
clarity of outline with which we see everything that
Lamb wants us to see, is perhaps inclined to make us
forget that there are a number of things which he does not
wish us to see. We know him so well where we do know
him, that we take no account of the gaps in our knowl-

THE ESSAY 59

edge. But Lamb never speaks about himself in the way
Hazlitt, for instance, does: we are completely ignorant
of what he really thinks or of what he really feels about
his own life, and its course and its conditions.

Nevertheless, we find more of a complete man in the
essays of Elia than in any other English essays. We have
his finely cut, keen and original mind, his leaping freak-
ish nonsense, his tenderness, his irrational prejudices, his
myriad moods of grave and gay. Like almost all great
artists Lamb has created an unmistakable world of his
own in his art. His style composes, as it were, a new
element, in which we live and move and breathe while
we read him; an atmosphere which is formed by that
peculiar and unique use of language of his, and which
seals the reader from the familiar and commonplace.
Words are his slaves. There is never the slightest danger
in Lamb of the atmosphere being dispersed by his lack
of the skill to sustain it. There is no blurring or feeble-
ness or fumbling. He can make his instrument com-
municate exactly what he wishes it to, whether he is
criticizing the tragedies of Shakespeare, or wandering
through Oxford in the vacation, or describing a poor
relation. His language can be as sumptuous and sonorous
as Milton or as simple as Steele, and his power of en-
larging his effects with the subtleties and suggestion of
quotation and allusion might be compared with that
modern master of the same art, Mr. T. S. Eliot.

THERE are very few essayists whose creation of person-
ality can be spoken of in the same breath with Lamb.
Some create mannerisms by which we recognize them
easily, some Macaulay and Pater and G. K. Chester-
ton, for example have a peculiar character of mind
which stamps everything they write and gives it a vi-

60 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

tality of its own, but that is not the same thing as the
creative egotism of the pure essayist. The only modern
writer who touches that particular quality is Max Beer-
bohm. His essays have not the width and variety of
Lamb; he has none of Lamb's vast reading, his mar-
rowy meditative vein, his direct humanity. He is de-
tached, sophisticated in his simplicity, sly and very quiet
in his humor and wit. The unity of his work is not the
unifying of a wide diversity of mood5 intp one person-
ality, but rather the unifying of a whole personality
into a single mood. The tone of his voice never changes,
but" it Is an individual voice of great polish and distinc-
tion.

It is not easy (says Hazlitt) to write a familiar style.
Many people mistake a familiar for a vulgar style, and
suppose that to write without affectation is to write at
random. On the contrary, there is nothing that re-
quires more precision, and, if I may so say, purity of
expression, than the style I am speaking of. ... It is
not to throw words together in any combination we
please, but to follow and avail ourselves of the true
idiom of the language.

There could not be a better description of the writ-
ing of Max Beerbohm. It reads as if it were the easiest
thing in the world, but no one else has done it. His
great talent in that style is the character sketch and the
anecdote, and it must, I think, be noticeable to all read-
ers, that it is undeniable that the more the essay tends
towards biography, autobiography or fiction, the better
we are pleased. The pure exploitation of personality is
a ticklish business. As Montaigne says:

'Tis a rugged road, more so than it seems, to follow a
pace so rambling and uncertain, as that of the soul;
... to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble
motions.

THE ESSAY 61

The soul, indeed, is so elusive and so difficult to cap-
ture in words that it almost always escapes, and either
leaves the mind to comment, or has its place taken by a
trivial and wordy egotism. The mind produces articles
and treatises and critical essays which appeal to other
minds, and provide intellectual stimulus, but a second-
rate egotism produces that most tedious of all poor liter-
ature the poor essay. And the fact that the average
reader does, undoubtedly, find essays in general dull
reading, leads us to an inescapable conclusion: the con-
clusion that the essay does not today satisfy many of
the needs which literature does satisfy, or at any rate
does not satisfy them nearly so well as either biography
or fiction.

LYR7C POETRY

'P

JLoi

.OETRY,' says Shelley, 'is the record of the best and
happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.'
There is a multitude of definitions of poetry, no single
one of them satisfactory or conclusive, but this one, if
it is not comprehensive, does at any rate suggest the
most important qualities in poetry. And those qualities
are, that it has the power 'to soothe the cares and lift the
thoughts of man'; that it lifts his heart too, and
brings a sense of gladness and fineness and tightness'
the sense which made the essentially prosaic Arnold
Bennett note in his journal; 'I find that if I am writing
a novel or story, the finest English verse has the capacity
to lift me up out of the rut of composition and set me,
and my work, on a higher plane. In other words, it in-
spires.'

The art of prose is apt to be a practical art. Its roots
are in the familiar world of daily life. It comes to us
generally with some ulterior aim, and seeks to argue, to
explain, to exhort, to tell a story. It is seldom quite dis-
interested, and if it is, it is apt to be dull. Poetry can,
and may, do all the things that prose docs, but it does
something else as well; it has a world of its own, and

still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

It is not that there are certain subjects which belong
only to poetry: there are no subjects which cannot be
beautifully presented in prose, but they are presented

62

LYRIC POETRY 63

in a different way in poetry. There is seldom any mys-
tery about prose. The effect is there, and we can analyze
its perfection and give a good reason for it. But the
beauty of poetry is far more elusive and indefinite. The
perfect essay is a triumph, but the perfect lyric is a
miracle. ^

This mysterious element in poetry is so universally
felt, that many critics prefer to make no effort to ex-
plain it. Even Dr. Johnson, with his passion for the con-
crete illustration, could find nothing adequate to say
about poetry, and confessed his inadequacy by an anal-
ogy: 'We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell
what it is.' Coleridge went so far as to declare that
poetry is enjoyed best when it is not fully understood,
and Professor A. E. Housman is driven to apply a physi-
cal test and to say that poetry is what brings the tears
to his eyes. But that does not get us very much further.
Boswell tells us that it brought tears to the eyes of
Dr. Johnson to read a poem by Dr. Beattie called The
Hermit, and to know that Milton's Nymphs and shep-
herds, dance no more has the same effect on Professor
Housman, tells us a good deal about the differences be-
tween Dr. Johnson and Professor Housman, but very
little about the nature of poetry.

Is there really nothing but the subjective test, and
must we be content to say that poetry is simply what
we feel intuitively to be poetry?

This is, of course, what we really do with any artistic
experience, and there is no thermometer which will test
the true heat of the poetic fire. Whatever we judge in
terms of 'beauty' is bound to be a subjective judgment.
When we say a thing is beautiful, we mean that it pro-
duces a certain effect in ourselves. But that effect on the
whole human consciousness is not analogous to the ef-
fect, say, of eating a meal on the human stomach. The
stomach is an organ of certain dimensions and certain

64 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

capacities, and the effects produced on each individual
by presenting material to it are easily ascertained and
have permanently fixed limitations. But the human
consciousness works in an infinitely more complicated
fashion. It is a plastic, shifting thing; it has the most
remarkable capacities for growth and expansion. That
coordination of its total faculties, that fulfillment of the
spirit, that amplifying and sensitizing of all our re-
sponses, or whatever we choose to call our experience
of 'beauty/ is never rigid and final. The more we live,
the more we read, and (I am sure) the more we examine
our reading, the deeper and wider and finer become our
capacities for poetic experience. An attempt to under-
stand what poetry brings to us, the discipline of read-
ing intelligently as well as intuitively, make us enjoy
poetry more, and hence whatever final mystery we may
find ourselves confronted with, it seems a profitable, as
well as a very fascinating, occupation, to try to find
out, in part at least, on what our intuitive perceptions
rest.

FIRST of all we do know that however mysterious the
nature and effect of poetry may be, it is, in fact, created
by the poet's use of words: there is no other way in
which it can be created. It must depend on his choice
of words; on all the trailing and reverberating associa-
tions they bring with them; on the sound of the chime
and concord of their vowels and consonants; on the way
they influence one another in tone and quality and
value; on the movement and flow the poet gives them.
Critics all down the ages have made attempt after at-
tempt to define poetry. They have coined high-sounding
phrases and used a wealth of abstract terms, but we
can, perhaps, come closer to the realities of poetry by

LYRIC POETRY 65

examining a little its particular use of the medium com-
mon to all literature the medium of language than
by a great deal of transcendental talk about Truth and
Beauty, the Divine and the Infinite. We need not be
afraid that 'we murder to dissect.' Poetry is living,
sturdy stuff: it will bear a deal of looking into.

There are fashions in poetry as in everything else. If
we meet the four following stanzas, we can assign them
at once to the Elizabethan age, the eighteenth century,
the nineteenth century, and the present day, without
any hesitation.

Her checks are like the blushing cloud

That beautifies Aurora's face,
Or like the silver crimson shroud

That Phoebus' smiling looks doth grace:

Heigh ho, fair Rosaline!
Her lips are like two budded roses

Whom ranks of lilies neighbour nigh,
Within whose bounds she balm encloses

Apt to entice a deity:

Heigh ho, would she were mine!

Hail, beauteous stranger of the grove!

Thou messenger of Spring!
Now Heaven repairs thy rural seat,

And woods thy welcome ring.

Sweet in her green dell the flower of beauty slumbers,
LulPd by the faint breezes sighing through her hair;

Sleeps she and hears not the melancholy numbers
Breath'd to my sad lute 'mid the lonely air.

We know
war and its dead, and famine's bleached bones;

black rot overreaching
the silent pressure of life

in fronds
of green ferns and in the fragile shell of white flesh.

66 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

But though the minor poetry of the past usually con-
tains an alloy of fashion which may interfere with the
direct enjoyment of it, great lyric poetry is more time-
less than any other form of literature. The great prose-
writer, even Boswell, even Fielding, delights us in spite
of the strangeness of his world and the presentation of
his material. The epic, the narrative, the satiric poet,
sets out to please a special audience in a special period,
and has, therefore, an element which confines him to
a certain time and space. But the great lyric poet sings
of his experience in the world of dateless emotions; of
love and death and nature and childhood, of eternal
dreams and eternal questionings. The issue lies simply
between his personality and words.

Poetry is a special use of words. The very sight of
words arranged in short lines on the^page immediately
prepares us to receive a different effect from those words
than the effect we receive from a page of prose. Our
problem is, what is this effect?

As we have said, it is something which removes us
automatically from the humdrum atmosphere of daily
life, in a way in which even the best essay or novel does
not. The words in the lines may be those we use a hun-
dred times a day, but their values have suddenly become
transformed. And this is true even if we feel that the
poetry is only mediocre.

Love guards the roses of thy lips
And flies about them like a bee;

If I approach he forward skips,
And if I kiss he stingeth me.

Lo, thro* her works gay nature grieves

How brief she is and frail,
As ever o'er the falling leaves

Autumnal winds prevail.
Yet still the philosophic mind

LYRIC POETRY 67

Consolatory food can find,

And hope her anchorage maintain:

We never are deserted quite;

*Tis by succession of delight

That love supports his reign.

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

These examples, even the last, are all minor poetry,
but they are poetry. They are all commonplace in sub-
ject matter, but just to say the lines over produces a
pleasure which prose can never give.

The framework of metre and rhyme by itself isolates
the thought in a poem from contaminating relationships
with everyday affairs; it heightens the pitch slightly,
even in poor poetry. But the actual beginning of the
pleasure I believe to be simply the satisfaction of the
formal design of the thought in the line pattern: a
pleasure of successful arrangement and orderliness, of
neatness and adequacy of language, of compactness and
logical structure. But not only is the experience lifted
out of the practical world and condensed in a pleasant
symmetrical way, but the words are made to move in a
way which gives them more power and beauty than
they have in a prose movement: that is, they create that
delight which is by far the widest, though not the most
intense, delight of poetry the pleasure of rhythm.

Rhythm (the Greek word means 'flow'), is not, of
course, the prerogative of poetry. Indeed, all language

68 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

which is deeply moving and memorable has the element
of swinging movement in it. There are certain prose
rhythms which are so regular in their pattern that they
are half-way to poetry in the way they affect us: the
prose of the Irish peasants as presented by Synge, for in-
stance.

They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more
the sea can do to me . . . I'll have no call now to be
up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the
south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the
surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two
noises, and they hitting one on the other. ... I won't
care what way the sea is when the other women will be
keening.

Or again, prose can have a splendor and dignity in its
movement which lifts us above the practical world just
as poetry does.

O eloquent, just and mighty Death! whom none
could advise thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared
thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered,
thou hast cast out of the world and despised: thou hast
drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the
pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all
over with these two narrow words, Hie jacet.

These rhythms are exquisite, and the rhythms of free
verse can be exquisite too, but their effect can never be
the same effect, or so powerful an effect, as that of the
regular sound pattern which we associate with the word
poetry. The poet who writes free verse cuts himself off
deliberately from one great source of his power the
primitive and profound emotional value of a recurrent
rhythm. He declares that the really important rhythm
of the poem is the e organic' rhythm, the individual, per-
sonal, emotional and intellectual flow of the experience
which the words communicate, and that this cannot fit

LYRIC POETRY 69

itself to an artificial form, but must create its own ver-
bal pattern to express its own individual inward pat-
tern; that, as D. H. Lawrence said, 'it is the hidden
emotional pattern that makes poetry, not the obvious
form. It doesn't depend on ear particularly, but on the
sensitive soul.'

But this is only a half truth. Of course the effect of
poetry is not on the ear alone. If it were, poetry in an
unknown tongue would move us as much as that in a
familiar one. Moreover, anything very melodious and
with a very marked rhythm poems such as Shelley's
Siuiftly walk o'er the western ^vave^ or Tennyson's
Come clown, O maid, or Meredith's Love in the valley
very soon prove so soothing that the reader is merely
rocked to sleep in a cradle of soft sounds. But, never-
theless, an enormous amount of poetry does delight us
mainly for its pure singing quality.

I'll make your eyes like morning suns appear,

As mild, and fair;
Your brow as crystal smooth, and clear,

And your dishevell'd hair
Shall flow like a calm region of the air.

Cowslips seize upon the fallow,
And the cardamine in white,

Where the corn-flow'rs join the mallow,
Joy and health, and thrift unite.

There's not a bonnie flower that springs

By fountain, shaw or green;
There's not a bonnie bird that sings,

But minds me o* my Jean.

The moon, like a flower,

In heaven's high bower,

With silent delight

Sits and smiles on the night.

70 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

It is no use being solemn and soulful about poetry
like this. Its 'obvious form' is a great part of its charm.

But even when we do come to more serious poetry,
this 'obvious form' need be no stumbling block to the
full expression of the sensitive soul. Indeed, the history
of poetry is in itself sufficient proof that it is not. The
rhythms of great poetry, however much they have been
conditioned by a regular sound pattern, have never
found themselves fettered by it. They have the individ-
uality of the waves of the sea, which we think of loosely
in terms of a regular rise and fall, but which have an
infinite variety of movement. As Ruskin, with his usual
precision of observation, pointed out in Modern faint-
ers, it is more exact to speak of waves changing, than
of their rising and falling, though ^that is what they
appear to do. A wave really goes on and on 'now lower,
now higher, now tossing its mane like a horse, now
building itself together like a wall, now shaking, now
steady,' but still the same wave. And we can mark its
individual pattern best against the obvious form of the
conventional idea of a simple rise and fall. So it is with
the rhythms of the great poet. The hidden emotional
pattern is the individual design of the wave, and the
originality of that is emphasized more clearly against the
pulse of a traditional rhythm, than if it is left to be
heard alone. We have only to think, for example, of the
infinite variety of personal rhythms which have been
executed within the fourteen decasyllabic lines of the
conventional sonnet form, and to contrast this with the
small number of free verse forms which are really
memorable, to realize that freedom can very well be 'the
weight of too much liberty' where poetry is concerned.

Moreover, the 'obvious form' can, and does, play a
very positive part in the working of the creative imagi-
nation. The metre, and in rhyming verse, the rhyme
scheme, is not a rigid mold into which the raw material

LYRIC POETRY 71

of the poem is to be forced, it is a framework which
conditions the limit of the thought which it is to con-
tain, just as a site conditions the limits of a building
which is to be constructed on it. The character of the
framework can provide a positive inspiration to the poet
for the manipulation of his experience, just as the char-
acter of a site has frequently proved a positive inspira-
tion to an architect. The demands of a framework can
call forth concentration or ornament, line or color,
swell, suspense or finality: it can enrich and fulfill in-
spiration as much as it confines it.

The eternal quest of the poet is to find the perfect
balance and adjustment between thought and form, be-
tween sense and sound. The fact that he is a poet means
that he must communicate his experience through a
rhythmical use of language. He has to manipulate and
weld words into a sound pattern which shall be the
verbal equivalent of the living power of his own
thought and feeling; which shall make it fully con-
scious, as it were, and distill its own unique quality. The
most obvious examples of this are poems which are
creations of emotional mood. It can be seen very well
in this stanza by Charlotte Bronte.

To toil, to think, to long, to grieve,

Is such my future fate?
The morn was dreary; must the eve

Be also desolate?
Well, such a life at least makes Death

A welcome, wished- for friend;
Then, aid me, Reason, Patience, Faith

To suffer to the end!

Charlotte Bronte was never more than a second-rate
poet, but the matching of mood and expression is here
perfect. The deadness, the dreariness of the emotion is
transmitted in a dullness, a flatness and tonelessness of
language which is its very echo.

7 2 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

But as an illustration of a great poet at work on the
same problem take the first verse of Keats's Ode to
Aiitumn.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

The poet's imagination is brimming with thoughts,
feelings and sensations of the richness, the fertility, the
fulfillment of autumn, and every line and every word of
the description call this into being. The slow, peaceful
movement of the rhythm, the whole verse one long,
lingering sentence, gathering a wealth of picture and im-
pression as it flows of mist and sunshine, of laden
orchards and cottage gardens, of plenty and soft seren-
ity, and mature consummation. The whole effect created
by words which by their associations and by their sound
(particularly by the subtle use of the letter /), call up
every suggestion of warmth and abundance and tran-
quillity: 'bosom-friend,' 'maturing sun,' 'moss'd cottage-
trees,' 'sweet kernel,' 'mellow fruitfulness,' 'load and
bless,' 'swell,* 'plump,' 'apples,' 'clammy cells.'

Or again, the poet may invoke the tone and color a* id
unique flavor of the experience which he is communi-
cating by his use of images. In the second verse of the
Ode to Autumn Keats does this by the creation of an
unforgettable series of pictures in which the spirit of
the season is incarnated into living figures; and the

LYRIC POETRY 73

great poet can almost always be known by his power to
evoke picture and sensation from illustrative images.

Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven,
With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace.

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicean barks of yore
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,

The weary way-worn wanderer bore

To his own native shore.

Or that wonderful simile Keats found to describe the
loneliness and dreariness of the fallen Titans.

like a dismal cirque
Of Druid stones upon a forlorn moor,
When the chill rain begins at shut of eve
In dull November.

Words can indeed do wonderful things. Once put
into short lines on a page, they take on a new vitality,
a sharpening of value, a secret potency, which they
never have in prose. They may be perfectly common-
place words of one syllable,

If yet I have not all thy love

Dear, I shall never have it all ...

but they suddenly leap into significance by the way
they fall into sequence; or they suddenly startle by an
unexpected contrast,

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone

or hang pulsing in the air long after they have ceased
to sound,

Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee O Time.
or create a vision by the very negation of it,

No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

74 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

or pack a revelation into an epithet, 'the silver snarling
trumpets/ the 'slow-chapt power' of Time.

Nor need the words have had any former poetic as-
sociations. A colorless or even an ugly word may become
significant, and sound inevitable, in poetry.

The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Batter my heart, three personed God . . .

BUT great poetry obviously does not depend on verbal
rhythms alone, or on verbal felicities such as these,
which, beautiful though they are, can be easily analyzed.
Most of these effects come from that * fundamental
brain work' which Rossetti declared to be so necessary
to poetry. There is no mystery in them, they are just
living and lovely. But there are certain emotional ex-
periences created by poetry which are more rare, and
which it is much more difficult to analyze. They arise
from the poet's possession of a faculty of experience
which is his especial and essential gift. For the poet not
only expresses his experience in a different way from the
writer of prose, but the experience itself is different,
and comes to him differently.

We all know the animating, revealing gift of the
poet, his power to e stab the spirit broad awake'; 'Poetry
lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and
makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.'
The poet, too, has the faculty of identifying himself
with other modes of being than his own. Keats gives an
example when he describes himself lying awake and lis-
tening to the rain 'with a sense of being drowned and
rotted like a grain of wheat.' But it is not the mere fact
of having extraordinary delicacy of sensibility which

LYRIC POETRY 75

makes the poet, for a writer of prose can have that too.
Dorothy Wordsworth in her journal, for instance,
shows every bit as much intensity and vividness of ob-
servation and feeling as her brother does in his poems.
But what distinguishes the great poet peculiarly is a
power of relating perceptions, of synthesizing them, of
arresting and transforming them by a mysterious
alchemy of fusion. Blake called this power 'spiritual
sensation'; D. H. Lawrence felt it as something beyond
his own identity, 'Not I, but the wind that blows
through me'; Shelley said it acts 'in a divine and unap-
prehended manner, beyond and above consciousness.'
The supreme moments of the great poet are shafts of
inspiration, a kind of happy and intoxicated reckless-
ness, when he creates in the sense and sound and associa-
tions and apposition of a few words, a fusing of abstract
and concrete, of thought and sensation, of emotion and
vision.

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!

Still would'st thou sing, and I have ears in vain
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not whh his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

Tyger, Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand and eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:

7 6 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;
Roll J d round in earth's diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

It is moments such as these which are the peaks of
poetry: when, as Robert Bridges says, the poet seems
to concentrate all the far-reaching resources of language
on one point, and the most expectant and exacting
imagination is astonished and satisfied. And this sense of
the highest, swiftest, purest flight of the spirit can be
created as much by the most utter simplicity of lan-
guage as by the most rich and complex:

Nurse's Song

When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast,
And everything else is still.

'Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,

And the dews of night arise;

Come, come, leave off play, and let us away

Till the morning appears in the skies.'

'No, no, let us play, for it is yet day,
And we cannot go to sleep;
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly,
And the hills are all cover'd with sheep.'

'Well, well, go and play till the light fades away,
And then go home to bed.'
The little ones leaped and shouted and laugh'd
And all the hills echoed.

It is pure poetry like that which is the ultimate mys-
tery: poems which are

LYRIC POETRY 77

still the unimaginable lodge
For solitary thinkings; such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven.

Directly we read the first verse Time and Space are
annihilated. It is no actual village green, no actual nurse,
no actual hill, no actual evening that is there. We are
caught up into a moment of pure disembodied love and
joy and peace, which has been created in us by four
lines of the very simplest words imaginable. There is no
mention of any of the emotions themselves which flood
the heart brimful of feeling: those have sprung up by
the poet's use of symbols, they are in the laughter and
play of the children; in the tenderness and simplicity of
the nurse; in the stillness. And this world of pure feel-
ing which has been created in the first four lines is sus-
tained, and made more clear and firm in outline by the
transference to the simple human pictures of the actual
children, and by all the sweet and happy and peaceful
associations of common natural beauties sunshine and
morning, skies and birdsong, hills and the fading eve-
ning light.

Criticism can do something towards describing pure
poetry: poetry where

without much incident or many characters, and with
little wit, wisdom or arrangement, a number of bright
pictures are presented to the imagination, and a fine
feeling expressed of those mysterious relations by which
visible external things are assimilated with inward
thoughts and emotions, and become the images and ex-
ponents of all passions and affections.

But the words of criticism seem heavy, almost suf-
focating, beside pure lyric poetry. It is, after all, poetry
itself which must bring its own joy, waking the senses,
freshening the heart, 'calling the lapsed Soul/

BIOGRAPHY

M<

.ONTAIGNE tells us that he loved especially to read
in 'those that write lives/ for, he says, 'man in general,
the knowledge of whom I hunt after, does there appear
more lively and entire than anywhere besides: the
variety and truth of his internal qualities in gross and
piece-meal, the diversity of means by which he is united
and knit, and the accidents that threaten him.' But to
the present-day reader it appears that there is extremely
little of those qualities for which Montaigne declares he
enjoyed reading biography, in any work of the sort
written by his day, and that he must have supplied most
of the psychological interest he found, out of his own
acute insight into the possibilities of such a form of
writing. Even the word 'biography' was not invented in
Montaigne's day. It was not used until 1683, when Dry-
den invented it to describe the work of Plutarch.
Montaigne calls the writers of 'lives,' 'historians,' and
biography had no standing of its own as a literary form.
Any description of the variety and truth of a man's in-
ternal qualities, and of the diversity of means by which
he is united and knit, were strictly subordinate to his
importance as a symptom in an historical situation, and
described only with an eye to illustrating that.

It was strange that the new interest in human psy-
chology which flooded the civilized world during the
Renaissance era did not produce in abundance a writing
of 'lives,' but in England that interest concentrated it-
self in poetry and drama, and though a few biographies
were published of which the most interesting is the

78

BIOGRAPHY 79

life of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish it re-
mained a very minor literary form. Nor was very much
progress made in the seventeenth century, though John
Aubrey's collection of anecdotes and descriptive details
about famous men is a landmark in the development of
biography. It illustrated the immense value of 'actuality'
in any good biographical work, of the noting of char-
acteristic detail such as those, for instance, which
Aubrey relates about Hobbes.

In his old age he used to sing prick-song every night
(when all were gone and sure nobody could hear him)
for his health, which he did believe would make him
live two or three years longer.

In his old age he was very bald; yet within door, he
used to study and sit bare-headed, and said he never
took cold in his head, but that the greatest trouble was
to keep off the flies from pitching on the baldness.

But there was one book published in the last half of
the century which was of far more importance than
Aubrey in the history of biography. John Bunyan was
imprisoned in Bedford Jail in November, 1660, and
some time during the twelve years he spent in prison, he
wrote an autobiographical sketch called Grace Abound-
ing to the Chief of Sinners, which remains one of the
most fascinating psychological studies ever written. In
it, Bunyan describes, in the most vivid and picturesque
language, the story of his conversion, of the struggles
of his spirit through various phases of doubt and diffi-
culty, and of his final achievement of perfect faith, on
a certain night when, as he says, 'I could scarce lie in
my bed for joy and peace and triumph.'

Bunyan's relation of what he calls the work of God
upon his soul, is told in a way all his own.

I could have stepped into a style much higher than
this, in which I have here discoursed, and could have

80 ENJOYMENT OP LITERATURE

adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do,
but I dare not; God did not play in tempting of me;
neither did I play, when I sunk as into the bottom-
less pit, when the pangs of hell caught hold upon me;
wherefore I may not play in relating of them, but be
plain and simple and lay down the thing as it was.

It is this plainness and simplicity which is so extraor-
dinarily compelling.

While I was thus considering, and being put to a
plunge about it, the tempter came in with this delu-
sion, that there was no way for me to know I had faith
but by trying to work some miracles. . . . Nay, one
day, as I was between Elstow and Bedford, the tempta-
tion was hot upon me to try if I had faith by doing
some miracle; which miracle at this time was this, I
must say to the puddles that were in the horse-pads,
Be dry; and to the dry places, Be you puddles: and
truly one time I was going to say so indeed; but just
as I was about to speak this thought came into my
mind, 'But go under yonder hedge and pray first, that
God would make you able/ But when I had concluded
to pray, this came hot upon me: That if I prayed, and
came again, arid tried to do it, and yet did nothing
notwithstanding, then to be sure I had no faith, but
was a cast-away, and lost; nay, thought I, if it be so, I
will not try yet, but will stay a little longer.

In these days, when I have heard others talk of what
was the sin against the Holy Ghost, then would the
tempter so provoke me to desire that sin, that 1 was as
if I could not, must not, neither should be quiet until
I had committed it. ... If it were to be committed
by speaking of such a word, then I have been as if my
mouth would have spoken that word, whether I would
or no; and in so strong a measure was this temptation
upon me, that often I have been ready to clap my hands
under my chin, to hold my mouth from opening; and
to that end also I have had thoughts at other times to

BIOGRAPHY 81

leap with my head downward into some muck-hole or
other, to keep my mouth from speaking.

Incident after incident is presented in the form of a
direct dramatic dialogue between himself and Satan.

Then hath the tempter come upon me with such dis-
couragements as these: You are very hot for mercy,
but I will cool you . . . many have been as hot as you
for a spurt, but I have quenched their zeal. . . . Then,
thought I, I am glad this comes into my mind: well, I
will watch and take what care I can. Though you do
(said Satan), I shall be too hard for you; I will cool you
insensibly by degrees, by little and little. What care
I (saith he), though I be seven years in chilling your
heart, if I can do it at last? Continual rocking will
lull a crying child asleep: . . . Though you be burning
hot at present, I can pull you from this fire; I shall have
you cold before it be long.

'Oh! many a pull hath my heart had with Satan,' he
exclaims, and every detail of his 'tugging and striving,'
of his combats and conflicts, his sinkings and despairs,
and his flashes of hope: all the darkness and terrors, all
the emptiness and heartache are revealed with that
direct, concrete imagery, and vigorous familiar speech
which was afterwards to make The Pilgrim's Progress
one of the immortal books of the world. We see his life,
hung in doubt before him, 'not knowing which way to
tip'; or his soul, like 'a child that was fallen into a mill-
pit, who, though it could make some shift to scramble
and sprawl in the water, yet, because it could find no
hold for hand or foot, therefore at last it must die in
that condition': or again, peace comes for a while, 'and
methought I saw as if the tempter did leer and steal
away from me, as being ashamed of what he had done/

All this is a revelation of how the workings of the
human spirit can be laid bare, and of how a personality

8i ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

can be created by the skilful selection of episode and
dialogue. But Bunyan had no successors, and his in-
stinctive and simple art stands alone in his own day. It
was not until Dryden, at the end of the century, de-
fined biography as 'the history of particular men's lives,'
that he conferred on it the dignity of an independent
literary form, and indicated the whole of its future de-
velopment up to the present day. Biography, he says,
differs from history:

the pageantry of life is taken away: you see the poor
reasonable animal as naked as ever nature made him:
are made acquainted with his passions and his follies:
and find the demi-god a man.

The whole character of eighteenth-century society
fostered an interest in such a form of writing as this.
The rapidly increasing reading public no longer had the
Elizabethan love of 'the pageantry of life,' and the lit-
erature written for that public no longer supplied pic-
tures of it. Essays and novels concerned themselves with
new fields: with the lives and problems of 'the poor
reasonable animal,' with all the infinite varieties of his
genus, and with the actual practical details of his daily
existence and environment. It was very natural, there-
fore, that the lives of the dead should be written in the
same spirit. The new ideals of writing, too, encouraged
clarity and coherence of statement, and all the qualities
of arrangement and order particularly necessary for
biographical writing. There are three books which are
landmarks in the history of the new form: Roger
North's lives of his three brothers (published between
1740 and 1744), Johnson's Life of Savage (1744), and
Mason's Life and Letters of Gray (1774). North intro-
duced passages from letters and diaries, seeing their im-
portance as 'images of interior thought,' and Mason was
really the pioneer who pointed the way for Boswell. His

BIOGRAPHY 83

biography was almost entirely a collection of Gray's
own letters, with explanatory notes by himself,, and he
writes in defence of it:

The method in which I have arranged the foregoing
pages has, I trust, one degree of merit that it makes
the reader so well acquainted with the man himself as
to render it totally unnecessary to conclude the whole
with his character.

The book would have had an even greater degree of
merit, however, if Mason had not falsified the text of
the letters and omitted the passages with which he was
not himself in agreement. It was a pity that he could
not have heard Dr. Johnson on that topic:

The value of every story depends on its being true. A
story is a picture either of an individual or of human
nature in general: if it be false, it is a picture of noth-
ing.

The writing of biography was perhaps the only kind
of writing which Johnson himself really loved doing
for its own sake. In his early days he never wrote any-
thing (other than the life of Savage), except for
money, and once he had his pension, he never wrote at
all if he could help it. When Boswell and Goldsmith re-
monstrated with him about it, he declared:

No man is obliged to do as much as he can do. A
man is to have part of his life to himself. Boswell. But
I wonder, Sir, that you have not more pleasure in writ-
ing than in not writing. Johnson. Sir, you may wonder.

We feel quite sure that nothing but the idea of writ-
ing biography would have tempted him, at the age of
sixty-eight, to undertake The Lives of the Poets, and the
vigor and freshness of his work there speaks of the de-
light he took in it. It is full of good things, but nothing
in it really equals the earlier Life of Savage, written

84 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

when he was thirty-five. It is a masterpiece. There,
nearly two hundred years after the work of Cavendish,
again we find a piece of writing which illustrates thp
two great essentials of all good biography. First, it is
concerned exclusively with the faithful presentation of
a personality; and secondly it is concerned to present
that personality in the form of a work of conscious art.

WHEN Montaigne tells of his love of 'lives/ he speaks
as if it were the mere subject matter of men's lives
which interested him so profoundly, and indeed, the
satisfaction of common human curiosity will always be
among the major interests of biography. It is the prime
essential of any 'life* that it deals with a life which is
worth writing about. Unless his subject is in some way
remarkable, the author of a biography is helpless. He
cannot go beyond his material. Thackeray can make an
Arthur Pendennis the hero of a novel, because he can
invent such incidents and create such environment about
him, that the story of a weak and egotistical young
nobody takes on a significance in which the intrinsic
human importance of the central figure is immaterial.
But if Pendennis were an historical figure, and we had
nothing but his early poems in The County Chronicle,
his letters to his mother and to Blanche Amory and to
Warrington, his newspaper articles in The Pall Mall
Gazette, and that famous novel Walter Lorraine, it
would be a difficult task to make a fine biography of
him. The subject of a biography "must be an important,
or in some way unusual, figure.

But that essential in the subject matter once granted,
the merits of biography become a literary and artistic
question: a question of how it is done. Harold Nicolson
declares that the writing of biography requires nothing

BIOGRAPHY 85

but a particular form of talent, and that there is no
biography which is a work of genius. In a sense, I sup-
pose this is true. The biographer has no need of the
power to create character, since that is already in his
subject, and the very quality of his material its almost
inevitable limitation to documentary evidence excludes
so much of the emotional possibilities which the novel-
ist or dramatist is free to create as he will. No one who
really cares about biography wants it to develop in the
direction in which it has strayed of recent years, where
there is no strict line drawn between factual and im-
aginative truth, and where we never know whether we
are reading words which the characters are known to
have uttered, or conversations invented for them by the
mind of the author. Inevitably the problems of the
honest biographer are primarily those of synthesis and
analysis, of selection and arrangement. Yet in spite of
this, when Carlyle said that to write a good life was
almost as hard as to live one, he made a gross under-
statement. It is quite clearly far, far harder. There are
very few of us who could not point, even among our
own acquaintance, to lives really well lived: but in the
two hundred years since the publication of Johnson's
Life of Savage, of lives really well written there have
not been above one or two in a generation.

What, then, are the qualities necessary to the biog-
rapher, the qualities which are clearly so rare of attain-
ment?

1 To preserve a becoming brevity a brevity which
excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that
is significant that, surely, is the first duty of a bi-
ographer. The second, no less surely, is to maintain his
own freedom of spirit.

So Lytton Strachey, the greatest biographer of the
present century, defined the aims which he himself was

86 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

seeking; and it is worth examining a little more closely
what those aims imply.

To exclude everything that is redundant and nothing
that is significant means that the essential literary qual-
ity in a good biography, as in any other work of art, is
its unity, the relation of its parts to the whole. As Sir
Edmund Gosse says, 'broad views are entirely out of
place in biography, and there is perhaps no greater lit-
erary mistake than to attempt the "Life and Times" of a
man. . . . Biography is a study sharply defined by two
definite events, birth and death.' That the personality
of the subject should shine out, clearly and firmly out-
lined, an unmistakable portrait, is obviously the central
unity of a good biography. But the presentation of that
complete and living portrait involves ^a supreme intel-
lectual and emotional tact in the treatment of material.
The complexity from which this ultimate unity is to
emerge can be appalling. The human personality of even
the dullest and most commonplace of us at any given
moment is complex enough: five minutes of honest in-
trospection are enough to convince us of that. But the
biographer has not only to evoke truthfully the picture
of a personality at any given moment, but he has to
combine that with the sense of the value and impor-
tance of that moment in the whole growth and develop-
ment, the final outline, of his central figure. Every
detail of evidence, the record of every intellectual,
emotional, practical experience that figure lived through,
every mood and action, every thought and every human
contact of which there is knowledge, must appear in
just relationship of importance or unimportance t6 the
whole. Time and space, age and environment, have to
be living forces in the whole composition, as well as the
multitude of intellectual ideas, and other human per-
sonalities which jostle each other as essential elements
in it. Somehow, too, different planes of experience have

BIOGRAPHY 87

to be accounted for and brought into perspective. Again,
we know ourselves, how many different characters each
of us can be under the same skin. We are lover, friend,
parent, child, or member of a committee: or we are
ourselves, alone, reading a book, or day-dreaming. Each
part we play has some rhythm of its own, its own
tempo and movement; something which distinguishes
the T in that character from the T which plays any
of the others. As Walt Whitman says, 'Do I contradict
myself? very well, I contradict myself, I contain mul-
titudes.' The evidence of all these public and private
and perhaps contradictory characters within the per-
sonality of his subject, must be taken account of by
the biographer: somehow order must arise from this
chaos, harmony from this concourse of independent
melodies and discords.

To exclude everything that is redundant and nothing
that is significant involves, then, the whole process of
organization by which the complete unity and vitality
of a personality is evoked from a mass of material to
achieve that is the first duty of the biographer. The
second, says Strachey, is 'to maintain his own freedom
of spirit,' and he goes on to explain what he means by
that statement. 'It is not his business to be complimen-
tary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case,
as he understands them.'

We are apt to forget today, how revolutionary a
statement of the ethics of biography Strachey was mak-
ing when he wrote the preface to Eminent Victorians in
1918. By that time honesty in biography had fallen
completely out of fashion, and Strachey found himself
in exactly the same position as Johnson wrote from in
The Idler of November 24th, 1750.

There are many who think it an act of piety to hide
the faults or failings of their friends, even when they

88 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

can no longer suffer by their detection. We therefore
see whole ranks of characters adorned with uniform
panegyric, and not to be known from one another but
by extrinsic and casual circumstances. ... If we owe
regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more
respect to be laid to knowledge, to virtue and to truth.

Or again, as he says in one of his most characteristic
utterances:

Whether to see life as it is, will give us much consola-
tion, I know not; but the consolation which is drawn
from truth, if any there be, is solid and durable: that
which may be derived from error, must be, like its
original, fallacious and fugitive.

But a hundred years later no one who wrote biog-
raphy any longer held that honest a"nd excellent doc-
trine. 'How delicate, how decent is English biography,
bless its mealy mouth! A Damocles sword of respectabil-
ity hangs forever over the poor English life- writer . . .
and reduces him to the verge of paralysis.' So Carlyle:
while at the same time Tennyson was writing, 'What
business has the public to know about Byron's wild-
nesses? He has given them fine work and they ought to
be satisfied.' And the result is the typical Victorian
'life,' which was in spirit very much like numbers of
lives written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
and now forgotten: stories based, not upon truth, but
upon the commemorative instinct, and suppressing
every fact and every opinion which did not accord with
the general standard of greatness and goodness then
current. Izaak Walton, for example, in the seventeenth
century, wrote a series of charming 'Lives' of some of
his contemporaries, in which Wotton and Donne,
Hooker and Herbert all appear almost as gentle and
kindly and quiet-loving as Walton himself, and with
hardly any of the inconvenient passions and ambitions

BIOGRAPHY 89

and temperaments which characterized them in reality.
Another example of the same thing is Mrs. GaskelPs Life
of Charlotte Bronte. It is a fascinating picture of the
Brontes. The personalities of all the family are clear-cut
and picturesque; the background and environment are
most skilfully suggested; the scenes are full of dramatic
emotion; the narrative is clear and flowing. It is the
work of an artist, but of an artist in fiction. It is com-
pletely convincing, but a great deal of it happens to be
untrue. Mrs. Gaskell quite deliberately omitted and
altered and falsified evidence to obtain the effect she
wanted, that is, to be 'complimentary' to Charlotte, and
it was not, I think, until E. F. Benson published his
Charlotte Bronte in 1932 that the complete facts were
correctly stated.

The Victorian treatment of biography as if it were a
branch of hagiology (the literature which deals with the
lives of the saints) , was weakened by the publication of
Froude's Carlylc. Froude refused to be merely compli-
mentary in his portrait of his hero, and portrayed him
as a very living human being. Unfortunately, however,
he too omitted and falsified documentary evidence when
it did not agree with his own thesis, just as Mason had
done in the eighteenth century, and it was not until
the appearance of Eminent Victorians that what we
now regard as the modern spirit in biography came into
being.

BUT Strachey's biographical creed contains an impor-
tant qualification which we have not yet commented
upon. He demanded from the biographer 'freedom of
jpirit' to set out the facts of the case, but it is the facts
si the case 'as he understands them.' For biography, like
ill other forms of writing, is a collaboration a collab-
oration between the material and the artist, and the

90 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

personality of the artist must inevitably color his art.
It is all very well to talk about the 'facts/ but as Talley-
rand said, there is nothing which can so easily be ar-
ranged as facts.

There will always be two 'schools' of biography, each
of which works by a different method towards the same
ideal. There is the type which was really invented by
Mason, and of which Boswell is the finest example.
Present-day illustrations of this type are the biographies
of Keats by Amy Lowell and of Carlyle by D. A. Wilson.
Then there is the type of which Johnson himself, and
Lytton Strachey in the present day, are excellent ex-
amples. The aim of each is to evoke a personality, and
to use all relevant material to do so, but their method
of using material is different. One uses an impersonal
approach, the other a personal. Boswell patiently col-
lected a mass of direct evidence about his hero, and
built up and arranged his material to convey to the
reader the same solid portrait of Johnson that he carried
in his own mind and heart. But that is the extent of his
deliberate artistry. He did not attempt to affect the
values of that portrait by any special standpoint from
which he viewed his material, or by any deliberate
coloring of his own personality. There was, of course,
no question of his seeing Johnson from the standpoint
of a world which held any values different from his
own, for he and his hero belonged to the same world
and held exactly the same principles about it. But in
any case, Boswell was rightly unconcerned about the
importance of his own personality, and it is very seldom
that he consciously allows it to enter into his work at
all, except in so far as it illustrates and clarifies that of
Johnson.

This does not mean that the personality of Boswell is
not an essential element in the Life of Samuel Johnson,
for it is: but it is an unconscious element. Boswell often

BIOGRAPHY 91

appears in a most unattractive light in the glimpses we
get of him in his own pages. He is vain, almost incred-
ibly snobbish, malicious how he loves to record any-
thing derogatory Johnson ever says of Mrs. Thrale!
bumptious, and often completely fatuous 'infidelity
in a Highland gentleman appeared to me peculiarly
offensive'! But those who attack Boswell as a man and
laud him as an artist, sometimes forget that it was his
possession of certain human qualities, quite as much as
of certain literary qualities, which make the 'Life' the
book it is. His insatiable, insensitive curiosity, which
makes us visualize him sometimes as an inquisitive bull-
terrier, his general good-humor, and a certain stout
streak of independence of mind in him, are invaluable
for the reactions they produce in Johnson. But the most
important thing about Boswell, the thing which swal-
lows up everything else about him, was his plain human
devotion to Johnson as a man the facts that he would
sit up talking with him all night when he himself
wanted to go to bed ; that he would accompany Johnson
to Oxford when he himself wanted to stay in London
and go to the Handel festival in Westminster Abbey;
that he would give himself endless trouble to try to
civilize the Hebrides for the sake of Johnson's comfort,
and would offer himself ungrudgingly as the butt for
Johnson's wit. And Johnson responded to this with a
real love of Boswell. Clearly he often found him irritat-
ing, and often found him silly; but he loved him.

My regard for you is greater almost than I have words
to express; but I do not choose to be always repeating
it; write it down in the first leaf of your pocket book,
and never doubt it again.

Do not neglect to write to me; for your kindness is
one of the pleasures of my life.

92 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE
I hold you, as Hamlet has it 'in my heart of hearts.'

Or there is that charming little scene of them both
together in an inn bedroom in a small village in the
north of Scotland:

After we had offered up our private devotions, and
had chatted a little from our beds, Dr. Johnson said,
'God bless us both, for Jesus Christ's sake! Good night!'
I pronounced 'Amen.' He fell asleep immediately.

It is this luminous sense of mutual affection and con-
fidence which makes the spirit of BoswelPs 'Life' unique.
It enabled Boswell to be as frank and detailed about
Johnson's defects as Johnson was about his. He sup-
presses nothing: Johnson's terrific and senseless preju-
dices, his rudeness, his occasional childish bursts of
temper, his parochial-mindedness, his love of attention,
and his ill-humor if he did not get enough of it, his
descents to the cheapest of repartees, his horrible table
manners. And yet, because of the love pervading the
whole, all this leaves the sense of Johnson's real great-
ness and goodness quite unimpaired. It is that core
of love in Boswell, too, which causes his whole picture
of Johnson to be irradiated by a feeling of his innate
sweetness of nature and simplicity of heart; the quali-
ties in him which made his central faith that Ve are
born for the comfort and succour of each other/ It is
not so much the actual tale of his endless practical chari-
ties and generosities, but the way in which Boswell
manages to evoke the manner of Johnson's doing of a
kindness, as, for example, when he secretly bribes
Mrs. Williams' maid with an extra half-crown a week
to stay with her mistress when she is old and sick and
peevish: or the way he makes us hear the tones of
Johnson's friendly voice:

BIOGRAPHY 93

Sir, I love the acquaintance of young people; because,
in the first place, I don't like to think myself growing
old. In the next place, young acquaintances must last
longest, if they do last; and then, Sir, young men have
more virtue than old men; they have more generous
sentiments in every respect. I love the young dogs of
this age, they have more wit and humour and knowl-
edge of life than we had; but then the dogs are not so
good scholars.

Boswell claimed in his preface that in his book John-
son would be seen more completely than any man who
has ever lived, and his claim is amply justified. There
is no biography in the world like Boswell's. This does
not mean that it is necessary to be abject in admira-
tion of it. It is impossible to read it through and not
to feel, for instance, that it is longer than it need be.
There are so many dull letters from Johnson, thanking
friends for the loan of books, or naming the date of a
journey, which could very well be omitted: nor do
we need Boswell's own lengthy criticism of The Lives
of the Poets; and the way in which he interrupts the
narrative of the last few weeks of Johnson's life with
an attack on Sir John Hawkins, and a collection of
specimens of Johnson's style, and pauses, almost at the
moment of his death, to apologize for his early lapses
from virtue, arc real artistic blemishes. But they do
not make the book less unique. Boswell's great stroke
of genius was in inventing a method of biography
which was the ideal method for the biography of
Johnson. Johnson lived in men's minds not as a great
writer or a great thinker, or as the creator of any great
national or artistic work, but as a Great Man, a con-
crete reality, someone to meet and listen to, someone to
see and hear. And it is as a great man that he lives for-
ever in the pages of Boswell. It is the actuality of him

94 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

which Boswell has managed to capture: the man him-
self as he dined with Wilkes or put pennies into the
hands of sleeping children; as he hoarded orange peel
or shuddered at the fear of death; as he sat with a
pretty young Scots married woman on his knee, saying
when she kissed him, 'Do it again, and let us see who
will tire the first'; as he and Boswell walked arm in
arm along the Strand and decided that upon the whole
much more misery than happiness is caused by illicit
commerce between the sexes; as he discussed the ser-
mons of Mudge or Atterbury, or the acting of Garrick,
or what he should do with a baby; or burst into a fit
of giggles at the thought of himself as a Highland
chieftain; as he cared for his houseful of tiresome old
people, or sat in bed in the mornings; as he wrote a
joking letter to Mrs. Boswell, or prayed to his God.

The high water mark of the 'Life,' and the finest
distillation of Boswell as biographer, is the description
of the whole episode of the meeting of Johnson and
Wilkes at the house of Mr. Dilly, the bookseller: but
that is much too long for quotation, and as a short
illustration of Boswell's method, take this little de-
scription of Johnson and Boswell setting out on an
expedition, in the very early days of their friendship,
when Johnson was fifty-four and Boswell twenty-one.

On Saturday, July 30, Dr. Johnson and I took a
sculler at the Temple-stairs and set out for Greenwich.
I asked him if he really thought a knowledge of the
Greek and Latin languages an essential requisite to a
good education. Johnson. 'Most certainly, Sir; for those
who know them have a very great advantage over
those who do not. Nay, Sir, it is wonderful what a dif-
ference learning makes upon people even in the com-
mon intercourse of life, which does not appear to be
much connected with it/ 'And yet, (said I) people go
through the world very well, and carry on the business

BIOGRAPHY 95

of life to good advantage, without learning.' Johnson.
'Why, Sir, that may be true in cases where learning
cannot possibly be of any use; for instance, this boy
rows us as well without learning, as if he could sing the
song of Orpheus to the Argonauts, who were the first
sailors/ He then called to the boy, 'What would you
give, my lad, to know about the Argonauts?' 'Sir, (said
the boy) I would give what I have/ Johnson was much
pleased with his answer, and we gave him a double
fare. . . .

We landed at the Old Swan, and walked to Billings-
gate, where we took oars and moved smoothly along
the silver Thames. It was a very fine day. We were en-
tertained with the immense number and variety of ships
that were lying at anchor, and with the beautiful coun-
try on each side of the river.

I talked of preaching, and of the great success
which those called methodists have. Johnson. 'Sir, it is
owing to their expressing themselves in a plain and
familiar manner, which is the only way to do good to
the common people, and which clergymen of genius
and learning ought to do ... when it is suited to
their congregations; a practice for which they will be
praised by men of sense. . . .'

And they go on to discuss the architecture of Greenwich
hospital, and poetry, and plan out a course of study
for Boswell, and compare the delights of the country
and the town, and then row back again, with Boswell
shivering in the chilly evening air, and Johnson com-
menting on the 'fantastic foppery* of those who find
changes of temperature upsetting!

BoswclPs great practical achievement, his preserva-
tion of Johnson's talk, is the most obvious feature of
his book. This necessitated, as he himself described it,
a 'stretch of mind' which is very rare. He used to sit
up all night, sometimes four nights a week, writing up
his journal, for he found that unless he recorded the

9 6 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

conversations at once, he could not keep the flavor of
them fresh.

His arrangement of the talk is extraordinarily skilful.
The flow is so easy and natural, the parts played by
the other talkers so subtly subdued and harmonized,
the varieties of tone so well touched between Johnson
talking for victory, or for sociability, or about per-
sonal matters. Above all he communicates the solid-
ity and sweep of mind of this man, as topic is piled
on topic, knowledge on knowledge, repartee on repartee,
judgment on judgment, and gradually all the depth
and flexibility of his intellectual scope become apparent,
his vast reading, his prodigious memory, his vivid, con-
crete imagination, his humor, his insight, his wisdom
and humanity.

THE Boswell type of biography is by no means suited
to every kind of subject. We may say indeed that the
chief reason of its excellence as a book is that it is
aboiit Johnson, and we may say also that the chief ex-
cellence of the Life of Savage is that it is by Johnson.
In the one, the subject is far greater than the biog-
rapher; and in the other the biographer is far greater
than the subject. Boswell perfected the impersonal type
of biography: he collected all the available evidence
and his aim was, so far as possible, to let his hero speak
for himself. Johnson's own method is quite different:
only one letter of Savage is quoted and a few of his
verses. Johnson, too, collected all the available evidence,
but his aim, like that of Lytton Strachey a hundred
and fifty years later, was to lay bare the facts of the
case as he understood them; that is, to give a definitely
personal view of the evidence, to direct the reader's
attention towards a certain valuation of the facts.
There is no better illustration of Johnson's own

BIOGRAPHY 97

personality than his life of the charming and disrepu-
table blackguard who was known to the world as
Richard Savage. The whole spirit on which he conceived
it, reveals at once his great-hearted charity, for Johnson
himself had had to face life on exactly the same terms
as Savage. He, too, found himself friendless and penni-
less in London; he, too, had to make his own way by
his own wits if he were not to starve, and he had not
only to provide for himself but for a wife as well. He
knew to the dregs the disillusionment which poverty
brings, he knew the bitterness of unappreciated talent,
and the indignity of begging for employment. There
was no reason apart from sheer strength of character
why his life should not have been like that of his friend,
and yet there is not the faintest tinge of patronage or
self-righteousness in Johnson's sketch. He writes it out
of his sympathy with, and pity for, great possibilities
wasted, and in a spirit of humane tolerance towards a
man whom he insists throughout was more victim than
criminal, and caused little suffering to others compared
with what he suffered himself.

But in spite of his compassionate heart, Johnson's
judgment was much too solid and his honesty far too
scrupulous not to see Savage exactly as he was. With
unerring precision, softened by the gentlest humor, he
analyzes the temperament of the agreeable and dishonest
young waster.

He appeared to think himself born to be supported
by others. . . . Whoever was acquainted with him was
certain to be solicited for small sums, which the fre-
quency of the request made in time considerable. ... It
was observed, that he always asked favours of this kind
without the least apparent consciousness of dependence,
and that he did not seem to look upon compliance with
his request as an obligation that deserved any extraordi-
nary acknowledgments; but a refusal was resented by him

98 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

as an affront . . . nor did he readily reconcile himself to
those who either denied to lend, or gave him afterwards
any intimation that they expected to be repaid.

Incredibly vain, insanely imprudent and improvident, a
friend of straw, and a revengeful enemy, his cheerful-
ness is unquenchable. 'He always preserved a steady
confidence in his own capacity/ There was always some
excellent reason, unconnected with their own merit,
why his poems were not successful:

either they were published at a time when the town was
empty, or when the attention of the public was en-
grossed by some struggle in the parliament ... or they
were by the neglect of the publisher not diligently dis-
persed, or by his avarice not advertised with sufficient
frequency.

In scene after scene, Johnson shows us this familiar
and eternal type: spending money the instant it comes
into his hands, and borrowing more; always welcomed
at first for his charm and brilliance, and always wear-
ing out the generosity and hospitality of his well-
wishers; skulking about in rags in mean lodgings
pursued by bailiffs; always threatening to write a
pamphlet or publish a satire on those who offended him;
always believing that the tragedy he was going to write
was going to be a huge success, and consumed with
vanity about his poetry:

He could not easily leave off, when he had once begun
to mention himself or his works; nor ever read his
verses without stealing his eyes from the page to dis-
cover, in the faces of his audience, how they were af-
fected with any favorite passage.

Yet withal so fascinating a rogue that the very jailer
in prison supplied him with his food free, treated him
with especial kindness, and finally buried him at his
own expense.

BIOGRAPHY 99

We are apt to think that it was Lytton Strachey who
invented the art of delicately ironic narrative in biog-
raphy, but Johnson was before him. His description of
Savage being given a small allowance and being sent
away by his friends into Wales, to keep him out of
debt, is delicious.

He imagined that he should be transported to scenes
of flowery felicity, like those which one poet has re-
flected to another . . . listening, without intermission,
to the melody of the nightingale, which he believed
was to be heard from every bramble, and which he did
not fail to mention as a very important part of the hap-
piness of a country life.

(He) was convinced that the allowance, though
scanty, would be more than sufficient for him, being
now determined to commence a rigid economy, and
to live according to the exactest rules of frugality; for
nothing was in his opinion more contemptible than a
man who, when he knew his income, exceeded it. ...

Full of these salutary resolutions, he left London in
July 1739, having taken leave with great tenderness of
his friends, and parted from the author of this narra-
tive with tears in his eyes. He was furnished with fifteen
guineas, and informed that they would be sufficient, not
only for the expense of his journey, but for his support
in Wales for some time. . . . He promised a strict ad-
herence to his maxims of parsimony, and went away in
the stage coach; nor did his friends expect to hear from
him till he informed them of his arrival at Swansea.

But, when they least expected, arrived a letter dated
the fourteenth day after his departure, in which he sent
them word that he was yet upon the road, and without
money, and that he therefore could not proceed without
a remittance. . . .

The book is full of the most artfully turned little
ironic comments. When one reads it, indeed, one is not

ioo ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

surprised to remember that Jane Austen speaks of 'my
dear Dr. Johnson': no wonder he was dear to her!

He was remarkably retentive of his ideas, which,
when once he was in possession of them, rarely forsook
him a quality which could never be communicated to
his money.

It was his peculiar happiness, that he scarcely ever
found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but
it must likewise be added, that he had not often a
friend long, without obliging him to become a stranger.

THE method of Lytton Strachey, and of his chief imi-
tators, Andre Maurois and Harold Nicolson, is more
complex than that of Johnson, and far more personal
and self-conscious, but it is a development along the
same lines. Strachey declares that it has been his purpose
to illustrate rather than to explain the characters which
he reconstructs with such brilliance, but his own per-
sonality is so pervasive and so distinctive that he could
never have accomplished such an ideal, which is, in-
deed, nearer to that of the Boswell type of writing. In
spite of his detached manner, Strachey is a moralist
at heart. The facts of the case 'as he understands them'
means the facts seen from a moral standpoint, which,
though it is completely different from the moral stand-
points of his predecessors, is every bit as active. His
passion for intellectual honesty, his sceptical detach-
ment from all irrational idealism, and his dislike and
distrust of all irrationally emotional preoccupations,
are impressed upon every page he has written. He holds
quite consistently the point of view of the ironic ra-
tionalist, and while we are in his company that is the
only aspect from which we are allowed to see the
facts.

BIOGRAPHY 101

That this limits Strachey's achievement as a biog-
rapher can hardly be denied, but while it limits it in
width, it intensifies his success within those limits. For
in any criticism of personality, there is generally one
aspect of the facts, one pose of the sitter, which seems
to hold the truest view of the subject. If the biographer
can catch this pose, can capture that vision which seems
to see most of the facts, and to relate their significance
most justly to each other, the result is then an artistic
composition which is peculiarly powerful in its effect,
because it includes a double rhythm within it, a contra-
puntal movement which is peculiarly satisfying. The
complete personality which is being presented will be
there, vivid, living, unmistakable; and it is exhibited
in a searching, clarifying light, whose own quality adds
enormously to the quality of the whole. Such portraits
arc those of Johnson's Savage, and of Strachey's Cardi-
nal Manning and Queen Victoria.

But the method cannot always be so successful. Per-
haps no interpretation of one personality by another
can ever contain complete psychological truth. Too
many incalculable elements enter into the matter. The
vision of a Shakespeare can perhaps envisage and inter-
pret every kind of human personality; but there are
few such comprehensive and flexible judgments. The
majority of mankind can see clearly and in just pro-
portion only a certain field of human nature. Try as
they will, anything outside that is seen obliquely, out
of perspective: their judgment cannot stretch itself be-
yond certain limits. Hence there is an obvious astigma-
tism in the vision of Lytton Strachey towards certain
types of character very different from his own. It is
impossible not to feel that the focus is slightly wrong
in his portraits of Florence Nightingale and of General
Gordon, and definitely inadequate in his picture of the
Elizabethan scene, just as it is in Johnson's portraits of

loi ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

Milton or of Swift. The light which his own personality
sheds upon the picture is still there, constant in its
own quality, but it no longer shines upon a perfectly
posed figure, a perfectly composed scene. We feel that
the facts might have been understood differently, and
understood better. The emphasis is somehow wrong,
the manipulation faulty: there is discord between truth
of fact and truth of spirit. This incompatibility between
fact and spirit must always be a stumbling block to the
honest biographer: it is where his emotional tact is
most needed. Fact must never be ignored, but spirit
must not therefore be disparaged. General Gordon, for
example, was a pigheaded man, and his religious opinions
were certainly not rational, but he was a hero; and it
is really not much nearer the complete truth to let an
ironic insistence on his pigheadedness and crazy notions
about the Bible distort the picture of his modesty and
courage, than to let the picture of his heroism blot out
everything else about him. Of the two errors, indeed,
we cannot help feeling the first to be the more gross.
Strachey's greatness as a biographer is in the supreme
intellectual adroitness with which he handles material.
From his power to set a single scene unforgettably be-
fore the reader's eyes a scene such as that of Rome, in
the life of Manning, or of the hospital at Scutari to
the whole triumphant composition and compression of
his Queen Victoria, his artistry in the management of
mass and of felicitous detail is superb. Technically, there
is no one who can hold a candle to him, in breadth of
design, subtlety of juxtaposition, narrative dexterity, or
mere verbal brilliance. With what accomplished art, for
instance, he chooses and presents the incidents in New-
man's career, which expose with the deadliest precision
the character of Manning. We see Newman's simple
faith, his transparent honesty of mind, his gentle piety,
his directness of speech, his pitiful unhappiness, the

BIOGRAPHY 103

beauty of his selflessness and the completeness of his
failure in practical affairs: and over against this, without
a word of insistence upon the difference, or of judg-
ment between the two, we see Manning's innate crook-
edness of mind, his diplomacy and deceit, his animal
vigor, his unscrupulous lobbying, his energetic practical
ability. Again, how vigorous, how relentless, is the nar-
rative of the end of Sidney Herbert, or the exposition
of the events which led up to the death of Gordon, while
at every turn we find those forcible images and delicate
individual strokes of irony which make the reading of
Strachey a sheer intellectual delight. After illustrating
from Newman's letters, for instance, his childlike and
touching credulity about the miraculous in religious
faith, Strachey adds in a separate and isolated para-
graph:

When Newman was a child he 'wished that he could
believe the Arabian Nights were true.' When he came
to be a man, his wish seems to have been granted.

Or take the description of Arnold's sermons in Rugby
Chapel.

His congregation sat in fixed attention (with the ex-
ception of the younger boys, whose thoughts occa-
sionally wandered) , while he propounded the general
principles both of his own conduct and that of the Al-
mighty, or indicated the bearing of the incidents of
Jewish history in the sixth century B. c. upon the con-
duct of English schoolboys in 1830.

Or of Manning's call to the ministry.

In spite of devotional exercises and in spite of a
voluminous correspondence on religious subjects with his
Spiritual Mother, Manning still continued to indulge
secular hopes .... and it was only when the offer of a
Merton Fellowship seemed to depend upon his taking

io 4 EN JOYMENT OF LITERATURE

orders that his heavenly ambitions began to assume a
definite shape.

IT is natural that the keen interest of the twentieth
century in the study of psychology should have pro-
foundly affected the content of biography, and there is
today a stream of 'lives' rewritten in the light of con-
temporary psychological theory. All factual truth about
personality is always of interest, but it is seldom that
facts about past lives are sufficiently positive on inti-
mate matters to afford real truth of such theories, and
the reader is apt to tire of discussions of the conjectural
sexual psychology of the great men and women of
history and of the arts.

The biographical work of Lytton^ Strachey was so
immediately and immensely popular, not because it ap-
plied any special psychological theory to the problem of
human personality, but because it re-introduced the
principle of freedom of thought into the writing of
biography. It liberated the public mind from the
shackles of conventional Victorian platitudes and atti-
tudes: there was a blessed sense of escape in the air of
the book. Its readers breathed, with huge relief, the
atmosphere of real intellectual honesty and liberty.

Eleven years before the publication of Eminent Vic-
torians, however, in 1907, a book had been published
which was a greater work of art than Strachey's, and
which showed a standard of emotional values and of
literary originality in biographical writing which was
far in advance of its age. The book was father and Son,
first published anonymously, but always known to be
the work of Edmund Gosse.

It was not a biography in the ordinary sense of the
term. It was an entirely new experiment in literature.
In the figures of himself and his father, and the relation-

BIOGRAPHY 105

ship between them in his childhood and adolescence,
Gosse saw a symbol of the clash between the dying faith
of puritanism and the birth of the new age of reason.
But as well as being a record of a struggle between two
epochs of thought, it was a record of a struggle be-
tween two individual personalities. It immediately sug-
gests comparison with Grace Abounding, for Father and
Son tells of a man who had exactly the same kind of
fervid concrete faith as Bunyan; but while Bunyan's
book is the revelation of a single soul, and its unity is
the isolated story of that soul's struggles with tempta-
tion, and final achievement of peace, Father and Son
tells of the struggle between two souls. Its central theme
is the clash of two temperaments. Bunyan's subject is
the growing, shifting relationship between a soul and
its God; Gosse J s is the growing, shifting relationship
between two individual human beings. Gosse isolates
the drama of that situation, with all its pathos and
comedy, its atmosphere of bondage and pressure and
misdirected enthusiasm, and presents it, as a most per-
fectly finished work of art, in the form of an auto-
biographical narrative.

He himself, the adult narrator, remains completely
detached from the drama. We are never conscious of
him at all. Our emotions and interest are centered on
those vividly actual figures who move and speak and
suffer and interact against the backgrounds of small
stuffy houses in London or a village on the coast of
Devon. But whatever the character of the background,
the emotional life portrayed against it is rigidly, cruelly,
constricted and curtailed. The little boy grows in body
steadily, while his emotional nature is suffocated, stunted
and starved. The father moves about at his biological
work, scrupulous, upright, industrious, and behind his
gentle and dignified exterior burns the inextinguishable
fire of the religious fanatic, the unremitting, unrelent-

io6 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

ing passion of the puritan. The core of his life is that
his son must be dedicated to God, that he must be
trained up under the most rigid discipline to be worthy
of the calling his parents have chosen for him.

The poor little boy, therefore, spends his childish
years in having every natural childish impulse towards
happiness checked and thwarted. He is allowed no play-
mates and no story-books. There is a delightful passage
where he describes his first introduction to the world of
fiction. In the garret of the house stood an ancient skin-
trunk, which became for him the home of romance.

The skin-trunk was absolutely empty, but the inside
of the lid of it was lined with sheets of what I now know
to have been a sensational novel. It was, of course, a frag-
ment, but I read it, kneeling on the bare floor, with
indescribable rapture. It will be recollected that the
idea of fiction, of a deliberately invented story, had
been kept from me with entire success. I therefore im-
plicitly believed the tale in the lid of the trunk to be a
true account of the sorrows of a lady of title, who
had to flee the country, and was pursued into foreign
lands by enemies bent upon her ruin. . . .

This ridiculous fragment filled me with delicious
fears; I fancied that my Mother, who was out so much,
might be threatened by dangers of the same sort; and
the fact that the narrative came abruptly to an end, in
the middle of one of its most thrilling sentences, wound
me up almost to a disorder of wonder and romance.

It was because his childhood was one long unnatural
nervous strain that he remembered it in such a phe-
nomenally vivid way. At the rare periods when he was
with other children and away from his parents, no more
remains than remains in the memory of the normal
healthy child, but the succession of scenes of strained
emotion in which he was forced to take part photo-
graphed themselves indelibly upon his mind. We see

BIOGRAPHY 107

him alone with his mother dying of cancer; learning the
terrible doctrines of damnation from his father's lips;
living through the appalling Sunday programs, with
hardly any intermission between various forms of re-
ligious exercises from eight o'clock in the morning until
long after his week-day bedtime, so that he would
'creep home' from the final prayer-meeting 'so tired
that the weariness was like physical pain'; or being bap-
tized with the full ritual of adult baptism when his
father had arranged that he had been 'converted' at the
age of fourteen! or on that fateful day when he had re-
ceived an invitation to 'tea and games,' and his father
declared that they must decide the question of its
righteousness by 'laying the matter before the Lord/

We did so, kneeling side by side, with our backs to
the window and our foreheads pressed upon the horse-
hair cover of the small, coffin-like sofa. My Father
prayed aloud, with great fervour, that it might be re-
vealed to me, by the voice of God, whether it was or
was not the Lord's will that I should attend the Browns'
party. My Father's attitude seemed to me to be hardly
fair, since he did not scruple to remind the Deity of
various objections to a life of pleasure and of the snakes
that lie hidden in the grass of evening parties. It would
have been more scrupulous, I thought, to give no sort of
hint of the kind of answer he desired and expected.

It will be justly said that my life was made up of very
trifling things, since I have to confess that this incident
of the Browns' invitation was one of its landmarks. As
I knelt, feeling very small, by the immense bulk of my
Father, there gushed through my veins like a wine the
determination to rebel. Never before, in all these years
of my vocation, had I felt my resistance take precisely
this definite form. We rose presently from the sofa, my
forehead and the backs of my hands still chafed by the
texture of the horsehair, and we faced one another in
the dreary light. My Father, perfectly confident in the

io8 EN JOY MEN T OF LITERATURE

success of what had really been a sort of incantation,
asked me in a loud wheedling voice, 'Well, and what is
the answer which our Lord vouchsafes?' I said nothing,
and so my Father, more sharply, continued, 'We have
asked Him to direct you to a true knowledge of His will.
We have desired Him to let you know whether it is, or
is not, in accordance with His wishes that you should
accept this invitation from the Browns.' He positively
beamed down at me; he had no doubt of the reply.
He was already, I believe, planning some little treat to
make up to me for the material deprivation. But my
answer came, in the high-piping accents of despair:
'The Lord says I may go to the Browns.' My Father
gazed at me in speechless horror. He was caught in his
own trap, and though he was certain that the Lord had
said nothing of the kind, there was no road open for
him but just sheer retreat.

This is the spirit of the whole narrative. It is never
bitter, never angry, never pretentious. The two figures
are seen without heat, and without any distortion of
violent emotion or theatrical pose, in the gentle, even
light of an intermingled irony and humor and pity. In
that, they play out their moving tragi-comedy to its
poignant and inevitable conclusion, and we leave them
'in opposite hemispheres of the soul' with 'the thick o'
the world* between them.

Autobiography is now almost as popular as biog-
raphy, and with the immense growth of interest in in-
dividual psychology and in the truthful reporting of
individual experience, we should find it a form which
offers much fresh promise and enlarged scope for the
literary artist. But there has not yet appeared another
Father and Son.

THE NOVEL

T

JLv

. HE novelist is he who, having seen life, and being so
excited by it that he absolutely must transmit his vision
to others, chooses narrative fiction as the liveliest vehicle
for the relief of his feelings.

So Arnold Bennett described his own calling, and it
is a very good description. A good novel always has that
sense of liveliness and excitement about it, and it is the
literary form which brings us closer than any other to
the flavor of life as we taste it in our own experience.
The drama is a more direct representation of life, it is
true, since it actually embodies it in flesh and blood
creatures before our eyes, but the scope of the novel is
far wider, since it includes the revelation of the mind,
and all the unexpressed and even unconscious aspects of
experience, in a detailed way quite impossible in a play.

The illusion of watching life itself in a novel is so
complete that it always makes the adequate criticism of
fiction as literature difficult. Indeed, dealing as it does
with the actions and passions of human beings whom we
think of directly as fellow human creatures, and telling
of crisis and incident, character and circumstance within
the observation of us all, it is bound to be very largely
concerned with the emotional and moral values men
live by, and to provoke discussion about such values, so
that to criticize the novel without becoming involved
in questions of conduct is an impossible task for even
the most determined of aesthetes.

The natural and primitive way to read a novel is to
read it for its story and its characters; to become ab-

109

no ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

sorbed in it as we would in the observation of a piece
of 'real life/ and to ask no further questions about it.
And after all, that is what the novelist wants us to do.
As Sterne says, 'I would go fifty miles on foot to kiss the
hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the
reins of his imagination into the author's hands be
pleased he knows not why, and cares not wherefore.'
The novelist is creating an illusion of life for his read-
ers, and he wants us to accept it, to become submerged
in it, to see it and hear it and feel it as he himself has
seen and heard and felt it, to believe in it whole-
heartedly, to want it to go on forever! And that, I am
sure, is the way to get the most enjoyment from reading
a novel. But what is important, and what is the whole
purpose of training in this field, and of not reading
novels entirely in this delightful pVimitive way, is that
we should believe whole-heartedly in the happenings and
characters of good novels and not bad ones; that we
should be absorbed and delighted in the company of a
rich humanity and a vigorous or unusual mind, and not
in that of false values and feeble sentiment.

For in a novel, as in every other form of literature,
we are always in the company of the author. We have
the illusion that we are reading a direct reflection of
experience, but we are, in fact, reading the reflection of
the mind and spirit of one individual. That one in-
dividual has made a rigid selection from life, excluding
everything irrelevant or superfluous to his purpose, and
he has seen and synthesized that selection with the vision
which is peculiar to himself. If he is an artist, we believe
whole-heartedly in his vision as we read. This is life,
we say, as we read Pride and Prejudice^/fhis delicate,
clear-edged picture of a tiny corner of English society
in the early nineteenth century contains a complete view
of common human nature: it is all there. And then per-
haps we read Vanity Fair, and we say, O no, Jane

THE NOVEL in

Austen to be sure was wonderful in that tiny sphere;
she kept everything so marvellously to scale that we
were quite unaware of her limitations, but her vision
was only that of a humorous, sheltered spinster after
all it is this which is life. It is this wide panoramic
view of the world, this variety of character and cir-
cumstance, this knowledge of all types of human beings,
this succession of vivid scenes in which they play their
parts. Life brings us all to that inevitable conclusion:
'Ah! Van/fas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this
world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satis-
fied?' And then, we read The Old Wives' Tale, and we
say, but this is life! Life is really the sense of the passage
of time; its very essence is in that moment when Sophia
looks at the body of her dead husband:

Sophia then experienced a pure and primitive emo-
tion, uncoloured by any moral or religious quality. She
was not sorry that Gerald had wasted his life. . . . The
manner of his life was of no importance. What affected
her was that he had once been young, and that he had
grown old, and was now dead. That was all. Youth and
vigour had come to that. Youth and vigour always came
to that. Everything came to that. . . . By the corner
of her eye, reflected in the mirror of a wardrobe near
the bed, she glimpsed a tall, forlorn woman, who had
once been young and now was old; who had once ex-
ulted in abundant strength, and trodden proudly on
the neck of circumstance, and now was old. He and
she had once loved and burned and quarrelled in the
glittering and scornful pride of youth. But time had
worn them out. 'Yet a little while/ she thought, 'and I
shall be lying on a bed like that! And what shall I have
lived for? What is the meaning of it?'

That is life, we say; and life is the way the human
consciousness is wrought upon ceaselessly from child-
hood to old age, by its parents and its friends and its

ii2 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

teachers, by its work and its play, and by all the re-
ligious and political and social traditions which enmesh
it. Life is the ceaseless application, of the twin truths
that e^rlc^

triumpKs^ o^x^ejrmromnent. . . . And then we read
To the Lighthouse, and in a flash of revelation we think,
Why, none of the pld novelists found the secret! The
vision of the outward scene alone is not life at all. Life
is the snaring of the passing moment; experience and
character are made up of the silt of innumerable unre-
imembered fleeting instants of consciousness. Life does
not build itself into the convenient symmetry of a plot,
it is just a succession of detached moments, of uncon-
jtrolled impulses of the sub-conscious mind; of dissoci-
ated images, of fugitive, flickering mood. It is discon-
tinuous, inconclusive, inconsequential. . . . This, at
Jast, is life!

LIFE itself goes on, and soon we realize that what we
have been discussing are books and the writers who
create them: what we have been enjoying are the
pleasures of illusion, not the pleasures of experience. The
life of a novel is the vitality of its author: it is the life
in its creator, not in the raw material of his creation: it
is the vitality of the expression, not the vitality of the
thing expressed. Life remains life. It may be interesting
to the liver of it, or it may be dull most people have
but little control over that but books arc exactly what
their authors make them. We imagine that there are in-
teresting stories and dull stories, but it is not so: there
are no dull stories, there are only dull people who write
books; and, we must add, dull people who read them.

Inevitably, then, we are back again at the realization
that the value of a novel rests ultimately on the quality
of the personality who wrote it, and on the skill with

THE NOVEL 113

which that personality can use language to communi-
cate the quality of his vision and knowledge. There are
as many ways of looking at life as there are novelists
who look at it, but if we take a wide view of the whole
course of the novel, we can easily distinguish certain
types of personality among writers of fiction which re-
cur over and over again.

There is first of all that type of large, comprehensive
vision which seems to see all and to know all, and of
which the greatest example is Tolstoi. His wide human
understanding seems to embrace the whole of life, and
to see it in a perfect and just proportion. In England,
Fielding, Scott, Thackeray, George Eliot, and,- at his
best, Arnold Bennett, have the same qualify of mind and
heart, without the same sweep and profundity of scope.
They seem to see human life with the eyes of a normal,
sympathetic, intelligent human being: their human
strength is their inspired normality.

Then there are all those novelists whose genius is so
personal and peculiar to themselves that they seem to
create a world of their own in their books, a world
which exists as a separate entity from that of familiar
existence. The enjoyment of Dickens, for instance, de-
pends on the acceptance of a world which contains
Mr. Micawber and Miss Mowcher, Quilp and Mr.
Pumblechook, Uriah Heep and Dick Swiveller. Stand-
ards of true and false become non-existent in it, for it
has only to be consistent with itself: provided the spell
is upon us, and we have accepted this world, we are pre-
pared to accept anything which happens in it. Or again,
take the world of a Charlotte Bronte novel; that elf-
world of queer children and eerie dreams, of goblin-like
Mrs. Reeds and Mr. Brocklehursts and Madame Becks
and of the harlequinade comedy of 'high society* in Jane
Eyre. That world dominated at every moment by the
passion, bitted and bridled, but always surging, always

n 4 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

blazing, always raging beneath the surface of a plain,
undersized, drab little governess, who cries eternally, as
Jane Eyre cried to Rochester as she leaves him, 'We are
born to strive and endure: do so.' Or, in the contempo-
rary novel, there is the world of D. H. Lawrence: a
world where every tree and flower, every insect, moun-
tain and animal, lives with a startling, glowing intensity
of individual vitality which we meet nowhere else, but
where human beings lose shape and outline, where a
whole emotional relationship lies behind the statement
'they were aware of each other'; where intercourse be-
tween human beings is less by language, touch or ges-
ture than by electric currents and vibrations, by dark
floods of passin released from one and drawn into an-
other, by living streams of unseen energy or irritating
occult messages of disruption and unrest.

'Personally,' said H. G. Wells, 'personally I have no
use at all for life as it is, except as raw material. It bores
me to look at things unless there is also the idea of doing
something with them. ... It is always about life be-
ing altered that I write, or about people developing
schemes for altering life. And I have never once "pre-
sented" life. My apparently most objective books are
criticisms and incitements to change.' Here is the con-
fession of faith of yet another type of novelist: the
satirist, the social reformer. And he contrasts himself
with his antipodes in the writing of fiction, the man
who 'presents' life, the pure self-conscious artist. In
some of Wells's books in Kipps and Mr. Polly and
To/w-Bungay, we can be completely absorbed in the
story for its own sake, but we are never unaware of the
presence of the author's intellectual ideas, and of his
courageous, gusty, challenging personality.

'To you,' says Wells to Henry James, 'literature is an
end, like painting: to me it is a means, like architecture;
it has a use.' And in a cruel and comic passage, he de-

THE NOVEL 115

scribes what the art of Henry James appeared like to
him:

It is like a church lit, but with no congregation to
distract you, with every light and line focussed on the
high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed,
intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a piece of
string.

There must, of course, be much of the artist in every
novelist, for fiction is an art, but there are certain writ-
ers Sterne, Henry James, Conrad, Joyce, and Virginia
Woolf are the chief among writers in England, and Dos
Passos and Hemingway in America whom we think of
as absorbingly, passionately interested in their workman-
ship. This does not mean that their 'content' is not ab-
sorbing to the reader indeed it is just because their
vision is unique that they have had to find a personal
technique to transmit it, but we cannot separate the
content and its expression. We read the books with the
very clear consciousness that this is art, not life; there
is an alertness of intellectual faculty needed to appre-
ciate Tristram Shandy, Lord Jtrn, Mrs. Dalloivay or
1979 which need not be there when we enjoy the purely
human delights of Anna Karenina, David Copperfield
and Mr. Polly.

WE HAVE said that the value of a novel rests ultimately
upon the value of the personality which creates it, but
that personality lives in a certain period of time, which
inevitably has an effect upon it. The 'spirit of the age'
is a shadow which walks inexorably by the side of the
novelist and which he cannot escape. Of course any
novel which is a work of art will have a quality in it
which will make it immortal; there will always be the
general in it as well as the particular, the eternal as well

n6 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

as the temporal. Thus the satire on vulgarity and snob-
bery and greed in Jane Austen or in Thackeray is quite
independent of the facts that Miss Crawley drove about
in a barouche or that Mr. Collins lived before anyone
had thought of an inferiority complex: the passion of
Jane Eyre is not just the emotion of a mid-Victorian
governess, or the life of Constance Baines just the life
of a late-Victorian middle-class provincial. But at the
same time, just because the novel is so much involved
with social relationships and problems of conduct, the
standards and outlook of its own day are almost always
impressed upon it, and these sometimes have a very pro-
found effect upon its acceptability at a later date. The
reader is always apt to under-rate the literary merit of
a novel when he feels out of sympathy with its stand-
ards of human value, just as he is apt to over-rate the
literary merit of contemporary fiction because he is in
sympathy with its standards. Mr. Middleton Murry, in
an essay on Proust in Discoveries, has an interesting
argument on this topic. He says that the writers of any
new period always seem to know more and to feel more
than the writers they supersede. If the idea of Natural
Selection has been freshly introduced into the conscious-
ness, one is peculiarly sensitive to the idea of the aim-
lessncss in all experience: if the idea of Freudian psy-
chology is freshly embodied in the consciousness, one is
at once sensitively aware of the ubiquitous manifesta-
tions of sex. All this has a very profound effect upon
society in general, but we are apt to forget that e an
extension of the sensibility has in itself no literary value;
and, even when the creative alchemy of art has inter-
vened, the expression of a new emotion will be far less
significant than the expression of a comprehensive atti-
tude to life, into which the new perceptions have been
absorbed.'

In our own day, therefore, we mistake the value of

THE NOVEL 117

many novels because we judge their merit on what is
new in their ideas. The work of Aldous Huxley is a
case in point. He is an extraordinarily intelligent man.
He has, I should imagine, the most comprehensive intel-
ligence of his day: his intellectual equipment and his
artistic sensibility are both of the first order. There is no
one whose mind is better fitted to combat all the con-
temporary false sentiment and feeble thinking which he
satirizes so brilliantly. He is the best of moral and in-
tellectual tonics. But he grasps and interprets life
through the ideas of the moment, rather than animat-
ing it through a wider and more permanent kind of
experience the interaction of human character and
event and one suspects that his reputation will be
mainly a contemporary one, and that only among the
intelligentsia. He holds the position in our age which
Peacock held a hundred years ago, and the readers of
Peacock today are very few. Conversely, we find our
appreciation of the novels of the past handicapped by
what we feel now to be out of date, or false, in their
ideas. And as the standards by which we judge novel^
will always be primarily human and secondly literary,
it is difficult to avoid this dilemma. It is only primitive
humor and primitive passion which are quite inde-
pendent of social codes. Uncle Toby and Parson Adams,
Mr. Micawber and Kipps, Mrs. Bennett and Mrs. Poyser
all inhabit a dateless world which never changes: nor
can Wuthering Heights be touched by the fashions of
any age. Though it appears to be clearly defined in
time and space, its central vitality is the communica-
tion of a kind of elemental passion which is bodiless.

But in general the novel "dates' more than any other
kind of literature, and it seems inevitable that it should.
Great creative artists such as Defoe, for instance, or
Richardson or Fielding, if they were writing today,
with the same qualities of heart and mind and observa-

ri8 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

tion, would certainly have an immense vogue. But the
mere facts of the alteration in manners, and of the whole
scale of morality and range of knowledge they embody,
make such a barrier for the average novel reader that
they remain the reading of students only.

We find much the same difficulty nowadays with the
Victorian novel. It was a most unlucky accident for the
history of English fiction, that the age which possessed
men and women novelists in England with the most
sane and comprehensive minds, should have held a
social code which prevented the free functioning, or at
least the free expression, of that mind. We have no
artists in fiction of the stature of Tolstoi or Dostoievsky,
but Thackeray and George Eliot might well have
equalled Balzac and Stendhal if they had lived in an
equally hospitable environment, and TDickens might
have been a great comprehensive artist instead of only
a great humorist.

It is the Victorian attitude to women which is the
great stumbling block. It is impossible as we read
Thackeray not to be convinced that he had the greatest
contempt for the opinion of his day as to what made a
'good woman.' Mrs. Pendennis is a good woman, and
Thackeray shows her practising the most unscrupulous
behavior in the episode between her son and Fanny Bol-
ton. Fanny is a young working-class girl who falls in
love with Arthur Pendennis. Their relations are per-
fectly innocent, and when Arthur falls ill, Fanny nurses
him devotedly until his mother arrives. Mrs. Pendennis,
however, immediately suspects her of having an irregu-
lar relationship with her son, and turns her out of his
rooms without a word of thanks for her help. She re-
fuses to ask Arthur to tell her the truth of the matter,
from so-called delicacy, and instead of not meddling at
all in his affairs, she opens, reads and suppresses a letter
from Fanny to him. Getting no answer to this causes

THE NOVEL 119

Fanny extreme misery. The whole attitude of Mrs. Pen-
dennis an attitude not by any means confined to Vic-
torian mothers gave an opportunity for a magnificent
satiric effect, but Thackeray is afraid of his public, and
prefers to praise Mrs. Pendennis fulsomely for her
maternal devotion, instead of satirizing her unmerci-
fully for the form it takes. There is the same thing in
Vanity Fair, in the situation between Amelia and Dob-
bin. We feel Thackeray himself to have envisaged very
clearly the truth of the position indeed it is proved
that he does so by Dobbin's final outburst, where he
declares her to be a mere self-deceiver in her idiotic
fidelity to the memory of her worthless young husband,
and to be quite unworthy of the love he has devoted to
her. But this declaration comes too late, and is hope-
lessly weakened by Thackeray having kept us in the
dark throughout the book as to his real opinion, and
having time upon time insisted that Amelia is the per-
fect type of sweet selfless womanhood. This is what his
age wanted to think, and that is what he feels he must
give them.

It is the same with Dickens. In spite of the first-rate
comedy in David Copperfield, the vivid dramatic
scenes, the vigorous narrative skill, it is marred for the
modern reader by the really nauseating sentiment of the
Little Em'ly episode. The situation is a powerful one.
The seduction of a young girl by a man who has every
intention of leaving her as soon as he is tired of her is
eternally moving, and the emotion is further intensified
by the devotion of old Peggotty to her, and by her dis-
loyalty to Ham Peggotty, whom she was to marry, and
his consequent suffering. But there is no sanity or pro-
portion in Dickens's attitude towards the tragedy of the
situation. The senseless wanderings of Peggotty all over
Europe, the scenes with Rosa Dartle, the insistence that
Emily's future life is irrevocably blighted, all strike a

iio ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

note of complete falsity to the modern ear, and the very
real pathos of the episode is lost in the distortion of the
standards which are applied to it.

With the passing of the Victorian age new fashions in
ideas appear in society and therefore in the novel, and
the contemporary consciousness begins to feel more at
home in it. The change can be seen very well if we
compare Pendennis with Samuel Butler's The Way of
All Flesh, or David Cop per field with Of Human Bond-
age by Somerset Maugham. This last is a fine book, but
Maugham has nothing like the sheer creative zest of
Dickens, and where they are each narrating of child-
hood, and no social or moral standards are involved, it is
obvious at once that Dickens is by far the greater
writer. Young Philip Carey, his uncle and aunt, and his
schooldays, are clear enough, but they Have none of that
'bite' which makes the pictures of David at home, of the
Peggotty family at Yarmouth, of Mr. Creakle's school,
of the Micawber household and of David's tramp to
Dover, etch themselves unforgettably into the memory.
But once Philip is adult, his story takes on all the reality
and conviction which gradually slips further and
further away from that of David. As he grows up and
reason develops in him, he sees the falseness and
stupidity of the religious and social ideals which the
older generation imposed upon him, and he realizes that
there are three things which he has got to find out for
himself: 'man's relation to the world he lives in, man's
relation with the men among whom he lives, and finally,
man's relation to himself.'

Philip falls in love, just as David does, with a woman
in no way worthy of him, as trivial and empty-headed
as Dora herself; and nowhere is the difference between
the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries seen so
clearly as in the way m which the two writers treat such
an episode. In Dickens the affair is made into a charming

THE NOVEL 121

romantic interlude. Dora is all delicate, feminine friv-
olity, and David all rapturous youthful passion. The in-
evitable misfit of the marriage is treated with Dickens's
inimitable light humor, and the inevitable tragedy of
its future is eluded by Dora's conveniently early death.
Maugham will have no easy romance. Mildred is anaemic
and suburban, cold and common. 'It's not much fun
being in love with a girl who has no imagination and no
sense of humour' thinks Philip miserably, as he tries to
make himself more acceptable to her by reading The
Sporting Timesl His passion is not a romantic rapture,
it is a sick, heavy obsession, and their life together is
exactly what the life of two such mismated creatures
would inevitably be.

Philip sets out to find what is the meaning of life,
and he comes to the inevitable conclusion of the ration-
alist that life has no meaning; that the value of life is
the living of life; that man is born, suffers, enjoys, and
dies, and that the only design in existence is the pattern
he makes, or thinks he can detect, in his own individu-
ality.

It is this idea which has proved the dominant interest
in the work of those novelists who have explored fresh
territory in their art during the twentieth century, and
it has caused a gradual shifting of their vision from an
observation of the function of life to an exploration of
the nature of life. We see the change first of all in Con-
rad, and in his novels he finds a new approach to the
nature of experience. The general effect^ of JL9 ve liJ??.
declared, must be the^general effect which Hf^jpaakgfc ojci
thTTlvfcrTrf^^ does notTnarrate, It makes impressions
on~aurorams: and that is how he strove to depict it in
his fiction.

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the
power of the written word to make you hear, to make

122 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

you feel it is, before all, to make you see. That and
no more, and it is everything. . . , To snatch in a mo-
ment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a
passing phase of life, is only the beginning of the task.
The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold
up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear,
the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a
sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its
form; and through its movement, its form and its
colour, reveal the substance of its truth disclose its
inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core
of each convincing moment.

Huxley, again, in Point Counterpoint, makes Philip
Quarles outline the plan of a new novel he wants to
write, which shall reveal the extreme queerness of the
new vision of life. The essence of it, he says, is multi-
plicity.

Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen.
For instance, one person interprets events in terms of
bishops; another in terms of flannel camisoles; another,
like that young lady from Gulmberg, thinks of it in
terms of good times. And then there's the biologist, the
chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, profes-
sionally, a different aspect of the event, a different
layer of reality. What I want to do is to look with all
those eyes at once.

It is the complexity of the nature of life which has
filled the modern imagination, and the old study of
character, which was the main basis of the eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century novel, has now become the
study of the consciousness, a much larger and vaguer
unit. The individual consciousness is seen to be the focus
of all experience, and the individual consciousness is an
infinitely complicated thing, neither homogeneous nor
coherent nor logical. As a result, the novelists who possess
this fresh vision of a re-arranged scale of values, are

THE NOVEL 123

impatient of the neat human patterns into which their
predecessors wove these formless masses of diverse im-
pulses and memories. They feel as Philip Quarles felt,
or as Lily Briscoe felt in To the Lighthoiise, as she
watched Mrs. Ramsay.

One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she re-
flected. Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round
that one woman with, she thought. Among them must
be one that was stone blind to her beauty. One wanted
most some secret sense, fine as air, with which to steal
through keyholes and surround her where she sat knit-
ting, talking, sitting silent in the window alone; which
took to itself and treasured up like the air which held
the smoke of the steamer, her thoughts, her imagina-
tions, her desires. What did the hedge mean to her,
what did the garden mean to her, what did it mean to
her when a wave broke? . . . And then what stirred
and trembled in her mind when the children cried,
'How's that? How's that?' cricketing?

THERE remains the very large question of how is it all
done? The art of fiction is the way in which the novelist
conveys his vision of life to the reader. He is not talk-
ing about life like the essayist, or presenting one par-
ticular life, like the biographer. He is revealing life, and
his problem is how to make the reader hear and feel and
see as he has done himself.

With most great novelists of the past, we never feel
as we read that it was any problem to them at all. This
is partly because they possessed more or less instinctively
the inborn art of telling a story, and it is partly because,
as a matter of fact, most great novelists of the past em-
ployed a very loose technique and were wasteful of their
effects. This is the reason for the extreme tediousness of

i2 4 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

much of them, but provided that the material interests
us, it is not of the slightest consequence. What does it
matter if Tolstoi or Balzac or Proust write far more
than is strictly necessary for technical perfection; what
does it matter if they spread and sprawl, when we never
want the books to come to an end? It does not, of
course, matter at all, and a great creative artist can do
almost anything.

But however lax a writer's technique may be, there
is always a host of practical questions which face every
novelist. Where is the narrator of the story to stand? Is
he to be in the story, identified with one of the charac-
ters, as he is in Wutbering Heights; or is he to be com-
pletely impersonal and never appear, as in Madame
Bovary; or is he to be a chorus or showman who can
comment on and direct the course of things, as in
Vanity Fair? Or again, where is the reader to be? Is he
to be facing towards the teller of the story, listening to
him, or is he to be standing watching the action itself?
Is the story to be shown from one point of view only,
and if so, is it to be from a point outside itself or
through the eyes of one of the actors in it; or is the
vision of it to shift from point to point? And what is its
scale? Is the aim to give a panoramic view, as Tolstoi
does, or Balzac or Thackeray or Dos Passos; or is it to
dramatize the unseen factors which motivate a situation,
as Henry James does; is it to illustrate a theme, as Wells
does, or is it to embody a definite point of view, to be
limited by a definite mood, as Jane Austen is by her
choice of the mood of social comedy? Above all, the
novelist has to decide how his action is going to be set in
motion, and how it is going to develop thence to its
conclusion.

It is commonly supposed that it is the creation of
character which gives the essential vitality to fiction, be-
cause in general we are more aware of the characters

THE NOVEL 125

than of the events which have called them into being:
and besides, once a character is completely created, it
exists for us outside the book it first lived in, and we
use it as a reference and standard in life as well as in
literature. But character cannot emerge except from a
course of events. We know Becky Sharpe because we
have seen her driving away from Miss Pinkerton's, and
vamping Jos Sedley, and worming herself into the con-
fidence of the Crawleys. Personality must be defined in
space and time before it can become actual (which is
why The Waves, though it is a marvellous prose poem,
does not satisfy as a novel) , and the central point, there-
fore, at which to approach the technique of a piece of
fiction is always the question of how the events are
made to move.

Until the present day, there were only two main
methods, which every novelist mixed in varying degrees
in his work. These two methods were the dramatic and
the descriptive ways of telling a story. In the first the
reader's eyes are directed straight at the characters upon
the stage, while in the other the reader looks at the
author and sees the characters through the author's ac-
count of them. There are certain novels which are pre-
sented almost entirely in one or the other method.
Anna Karen'ma, for instance, is almost all acted out as
on a huge stage, in a marvellous succession of scenes,
and it is this sense of being always in the immediate
present of the action which gives the book that atmos-
phere of direct living, that sense of almost tangible re-
lationship with warm, breathing personalities, which no
other book in the world possesses. An illustration of a
novel on a completely different scale, which is presented
in the same way, is The Awkward Age by Henry James,
but the complete alteration in proportion, and particu-
larly that kind of clinical chill, that sterilized emotional
atmosphere which clings to Henry James's novels, makes

ii6 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

the whole effect absolutely unlike. (The Awkward Age
should be compared with The Ambassadors, which is
entirely descriptive in method. There is a most interest-
ing and revealing account of both books in The Craft of
Fiction by Percy Lubbock.)

Balzac is the greatest descriptive artist among novel-
ists. Before ever the action begins to move at all,
enormous blocks of discursive matter are placed as a
foundation and as an environment for it. History,
towns, streets, houses, rooms, slums, and above all, com-
plicated financial operations, are described at immense
length and with immense gusto. There is no one who
can pack so much into description as Balzac, or who
can create such absorbing interest in it. His narrative is
so solid, so convincing, so massive, so concrete, that
there is no chink through which the illusion of reality
can escape.

The only English author who is at all comparable to
Balzac is Thackeray, but the drop is a long one. Not
that Thackeray has not a very masterly command of
descriptive method, for there is no one who can do it
better. Read, for instance, the opening chapters of Pen-
Aennhy or the description of Becky's career in London,
living on nothing a year. It has not Balzac's density of
effect, but it is perfectly poised, with such a broad easy
sweep about it. But the trouble with Thackeray is that
he cannot or will not leave his story alone. *As we bring
our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a man and a
brother, not only to introduce them, but occasionally to
step down from the platform and talk about them.'
And, alas, the reader is not in a position to refuse leave.
So that at every turn the story is interrupted. We long
to be allowed to become absorbed and submerged in it,
to sink into an illusion of its reality and to be carried
along by its easy flow. But no, we are perpetually jerked
out of it, and set on the bank while the author makes us

THE NOVEL 127

listen to a Jong monologue about youth or love or
women or hypocrisy or the past; or worst of all, while
he tells us that it is all really only a story, and that he
might have made it happen in a variety of other ways.
It is quite maddening!

No, for a single example of a fine novel told in what
we now think of as the traditional method, I would
choose a book written more than half a century later
than Vanity Pair, The Old Wives' Talc by Arnold Ben-
nett. Although its technique appears to us now a very
straightforward one, it is really much more self-con-
scious than the art of the great Victorians. Arnold Ben-
nett was a close student of Flaubert and of Guy de
Maupassant, and the impersonality of the author was
the central doctrine of his creed. He tried to tell his
story without any conscious intrusion of himself as in-
terpreter: the telling of it was a problem in the selection,
arrangement and perspective of the matter he had to
present. Guy de Maupassant had described what the
artist in fiction had to do.

Life leaves everything on the same scale; it crowds
facts together or drags them out indefinitely. Art, on
the contrary, consists in using precautions and making
preparations, in contriving artful and imperceptible
transitions, in bringing the essential events into full
light, by simple ingenuity of composition, and giving
to all others the degree of relief suited to their impor-
tance, so as to produce a profound sense of the special
truth one wishes to exhibit.

He might almost be describing The Old Wives 9 Tale.

It is a novel with a theme. In a preface to a later edi-
tion (it was originally published in 1908), Bennett de-
scribes how the inspiration for the novel came to him.
He saw a fat, ugly, grotesque-looking woman come into
a restaurant and sit down. She was so fussy and so awk-

izS ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

ward that everyone laughed at her, and it came into
Bennett's mind that a novelist ought to be able to make
a heartrending book out of the history of such a woman
as she, for

there is an extreme pathos in the mere fact that every
stout, ageing woman was once a young girl with the
unique charm of youth in her form and movements and
in her mind. And the fact that the change from the
young girl to the stout ageing woman is made up of an
infinite number of infinitesimal changes, each unper-
ceived by her, only intensifies the pathos.

The novel finally had two heroines instead of one, but
the hero, like the hero of Tolstoi's War and Peace, is
simply Time. Its motto is from Shakespeare's sonnets:

Time doth transfix the beauty set on Youth
And delves the parallels in Beauty's brow.

Bennett's great achievement is the power with which
he has conveyed the slow inexorable passing of two life-
times, the imperceptible flight of time, the gradual, un-
marked processes of change, measured only in the silt
of memories and the weight of the layer upon layer of
experience spread upon the mind and the heart.

The action is presented with a blending of the dra-
matic and the descriptive. There is a series of the most
artfully selected and contrasted scenes in which we see
and hear the characters acting out their destinies di-
rectly, and there are brilliant discursive interludes,
creating the atmosphere of the environment, or tele-
scoping the action into a retrospective generalization. We
see the two girls, like two racehorses in their splendid
young vitality; and then Constance as the young mar-
ried woman, getting plump and matronly; as the
middle-aged widow, stout, stupid, sweet-natured; as the
injudicious mother, with her selfless passion for her

THE NOVEL 129

selfish young son, Cyril. Finally, we see her lying on her
deathbed, summing up what her life had been:

She had lived in honesty and kindliness for a fair
number of years, and she had tasted triumphant hours.
. . . When she surveyed her life, and life in general,
she would think, with a sort of tart but not sour cheer-
fulness: 'Well, that is what life is! 9

And we see Sophia, in all the glory of her infatuation
for the second-rate Gerald Scales, in all the dignity and
distress of her awakening; getting older and more faded
in beauty in her incessant and lonely struggle to run her
pension successfully; her whole passion centered in sav-
ing money, and in being a landlady *the landlady:
efficient, stylish, diplomatic tremendously experienced.'
And finally we see her, in the passage I have already
quoted, alone with the body of her dead husband, whom
she has not seen for thirty years.

Human identity and human unimportance the two
blend inextricably throughout the book. Life inevitably
tricks the individual, filling him with ever-blossoming
hopes, smiting him in the end with the common lot of
apparent futility, but life is worth living, simply be-
cause every human being instinctively and tenaciously
holds it to be so. That is the impression the whole novel
leaves. Arnold Bennett communicates a double vision to
the reader. On the one hand, we see the lives of his
characters in the light of a sophisticated, cultivated ex-
perience. From this position we see, with the most sharp-
edged actuality, the setting of the whole action. We see
every detail of the solid discomfort of the house in
St. Luke's Square; of the life of the servant in the damp
basement kitchen; what they all had for their six
o'clock tea, and Constance's bonnet trimmed with jet
fruit and crape leaves. We see all the ugly, narrow,
dingy provincial life of the English lower middle-class.

i 3 o ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

against the grey, dank, smoky chill of the English mid-
lands, and all the perfect bourgeois gentility of Sophia's
final home in Paris, the Pension Frensham. Arnold Ben-
nett has an almost Balzacian love of detail: nothing is
unimportant to him, even if it is only the little plop
which a gas jet gives when it is lighted, or the gentle
sound of wool being drawn through canvas.

The scale of the physical and mental environments in
which both the sisters live their lives shows us inexorably
how dull and inadequate and limited and impoverished
those lives are by the standard of the sophisticated in-
telligence. But Arnold Bennett does not leave us with
that vision only. Throughout the book the perspective
constantly shifts, and no sooner do we feel how dread-
ful life must be in these circumstances, than we are
made to see that it is in fact not in the least dreadful,
because the characters take them all as a matter of
course. We arc made to sec life through their eyes, and
to realize the great truth that emotional standards are
quite untouched by social and physical environment.
Their lives become not only visible, but perfectly in-
telligible. We both see and understand the whole per-
sonality of little Samuel Povcy, the draper who marries
Constance. We live through his cowardices and his tri-
umphs, we sympathize with his gusts of independence,
his love for Constance, his pigheaded loyalty to his
cousin; and how 'at the end, destiny took hold of him
and displayed, to the observant, the vein of greatness
which runs through every soul without exception. He
embraced a cause, lost it, and died of it.' We see Sophia
falling in love with Gerald Scales: and realize that her
feeling is much the same as that of Juliet.

'So you decided to come out as usual!' 'And may I
ask what book you have chosen?' These were the phrases
she heard, and to which she responded with similar

THE NOVEL i 3 t

phrases. And meanwhile a miracle of ecstasy had
opened opened like a flower. She was walking along
Wedgwood Street by his side, slowly, on the scraped
pavements, where marble bulbs of snow had defied the
spade and remained. She and he were exactly of the
same height, and she kept looking into his face and he
into hers. This was all the miracle. Except that she was
not walking on the pavement she was walking on the
intangible sward of paradise! Except that the houses had
receded and faded, and the passers-by were subtilized
into unnoticeable ghosts! . . .

What had happened? Nothing! The most common-
place occurrence! The eternal cause had picked up a
commercial traveller (it might have been a clerk or a
curate, but it in fact was a commercial traveller) , and
endowed him with all the glorious, unique, incredible
attributes of a god, and planted him down before Sophia
in order to produce the eternal effect.

s

ONE of the most fascinating mysteries in the technique
of a great artist in fiction is the way in which the char-
acters seem to shift in size and significance during the
course of a book. It is, I think, one of the sure tests of
genius that the actors in a story should be capable of
this kind of expansion into beings of universal mean-
ing. Perhaps because it is an attribute of genius, it is
rare in the English novel, for there are not many writers
of genius among our novelists, and their characters are
apt to remain obstinately rooted in a particular time and
place. The characters of Anna Karenlna are Russians of
the late nineteenth century, but Anna and Levin are
eternal human nature, in its greatness and its smallness.
The characters of Bare best cr Towers by contrast,
though they live with great vividness in their surround-
ings, are English provincial gentry of the late nine-
teenth century, and have no touch of anything else in

i 3 2 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

their being. Even George Eliot, with all her gifts of
sympathetic insight and her breadth of vision (Middle-
march is, I think, among the first half-dozen novels of
its age) , does not wing her way into the eternal aspects
of things: nor does Thackeray nor Dickens nor even
Arnold Bennett. It is not a gift which has anything to
do with the power of generalizing about life, or even
with presenting it with great richness and diversity. But
when it is there it is unmistakable. It is what makes
Jane Eyre, in the scene where she tells Rochester she is
going to leave him, suddenly become a figure of uni-
versal significance, although that scene is full of turgid
writing and melodramatic nonsense. There is a similar
feeling often in Hardy, again in spite of a most clumsy
style, and often in Conrad, but the only English novelist
who possesses it unfalteringly is Emily Bronte.

Wuthering Heights transports the reader to a plane
of existence peculiar to itself. Emily Bronte's values are
elemental rather than moral. Wuthering Heights is a
book entirely about passion, and it is a book entirely
without sex. The marriages and miseries of the charac-
ters have nothing to do with conventional moral stand-
ards, they prove only that the whirlwind cannot mate
with the quiet places, or the wolf with the doe. If this
happens, the eternal laws of Nature herself arc outraged,
her harmony is disrupted, and emotional chaos results.
The reader is sustained in this elemental atmosphere with
effortless power throughout the book. It is said to be
badly arranged, but it is not of the slightest consequence
if it is. And the narrative device of the story being re-
ported, which some critics find very clumsy, seems to me
a definite triumph. It adds something really significant
to its quality that we should hear this tale of elemental
passion and cruelty through the mouth of that pattern
of solid integrity and common sense, Nellie Dean. The
story is so absolutely secure against alien interference

THE NOVEL 133

that it is proof against Nellie or the prosaic Mr. Lock-
wood or all the practical details of living of which it is
full. Instead of clashing with its prevailing atmosphere,
these things are simply absorbed into it, and enrich it,
while they lose none of their own identity. Throughout,
the dialogue will move, with the utmost ease and as-
surance, from the plane of ordinary conversation to the
heights of tragic intensity. Cathy and Nellie will be
talking about Cathy's approaching marriage to Edgar
Linton like any young girl and an intimate maidservant:

'Why do you love him, Miss Cathy?'

'Well, because he is handsome and pleasant . . . and
he will be rich and I shall like to be the greatest woman
of the neighbourhood.'

and by the end of the conversation Cathy is crying out
that Linton's soul is as different from hers as a moon-
beam from lightning or frost from fire, and of Heath-
cliff:

'I am Heathcliff ! ... If all else perished and he re-
mained, I should still continue to be; and if all else re-
mained and he were annihilated, the universe would
turn to a mighty stranger.'

In one paragraph alone it can be done, as when Nellie
tells Heathcliff how wicked it was of him to have
Cathy's coffin uncovered when Edgar Linton's grave was
dug beside it. 'Were you not ashamed to disturb the
dead?' she exclaims, and he replies:

'I disturbed nobody, Nellie, and I gave some ease to
myself. I shall be a great deal more comfortable now;
and you'll have a better chance of keeping me under-
ground, when I get there. Disturbed her? No! she has
disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen years
incessantly remorselessly till yesternight; and yester-
night I was tranquil. I dreamt I was sleeping the last

i 3 4 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped and my
cheek frozen against hers.'

It is a book of unforgettable dramatic moments.
Cathy and Heathcliff defying and screaming at Edgar
Linton in the parlor at Thrushcross Grange: the dying
Cathy, clinging to Heathcliff and sobbing,

'I wish I could hold you till we were both dead! I
shouldn't care what you suffered. I care nothing for
your sufferings. Why shouldn't you suffer? I do.'

Heathcliff's frightful cry as Nellie Dean tells him of
her last moments,

'I pray one prayer I repeat it till my tongue stiffens
Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I
am living T You said I killed you haunt me, then! . . .
Be with me always take any form drive me mad!
only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find
you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without
my life! I cannot live without my soul!'

or the scene where Mr. Lockwood declares he has been
put to sleep in a haunted room, and Heathcliff wrenches
open the lattice,

bursting, as he pulled at it, into an uncontrollable pas-
sion of tears. 'Come in! Come in!' he sobbed. 'Cathy,
do come. Oh do once more! Oh! my heart's darling!
hear me this time, Catherine, at last!' . . . but the
snow and wind whirled wildly through . . . blowing
out the light.

There is no explanation for this sort of writing ex-
:ept the possession of genius, but there is one clear way
in which Emily Bronte does definitely bind her human
world to the measure of something larger and stronger
and more stable than human standards, and that is, by
extending its passions, its calms, its struggles into kin-
ship with the elemental life of Nature. Charlotte Bronte

THE NOVEL 135

does it too, in a much cruder and more obvious way,
and we cannot think of either of them apart from those
forces which they both felt to be a part of their very
blood and being. Charlotte gets most of her effects by
descriptive passages with a clear symbolic significance
behind them, but Emily is far more dramatic and subtle.
In Wuthering Heights there is, of course, the simple
symbolic value of the wind which howls and rages so
often round it; of those few slanting, stunted firs at the
end of the house, and the range of gaunt thorns, all
stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the
sun; or the faint gleam of the golden crocuses which
Edgar lays on his wife's pillow. But Emily can create
finer effects than those. All the contrast between the
happy love of Catherine and Heathcliff in their child-
hood, and the half-mad agony of Catherine when
Heathcliff returns and forces himself again into her life,
is in the scene where, in her frenzy of hysteria, she tears
her pillow with her teeth, and begins arranging the
feathers on the sheet.

'That's a turkey's,* she murmured to herself, 'and this
is a wild duck's; and this is a pigeon's. . . . And here
is a moor-cock's; and this I should know it among a
thousand it's a lapwing's. Bonny bird; wheeling over
our heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted to get to
its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells, and it
felt rain coming. This feather was picked up from the
heath, the bird was not shot: we saw its nest in the
winter, full of little skeletons. Heathcliff set a trap
over it, and the old ones dare not come. I made him
promise he'd never shoot a lapwing after that, and he
didn't. . .

'Oh, if I were but in my own bed in the old house!'
she went on bitterly, wringing her hands. 'And that
wind sounding in the firs by the lattice. Do let me feel
it it comes straight down the moor do let me have

i$6 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

one breath. ... I wish I were a girl again, half savage,
and hardy, and free; and laughing at injuries, not mad-
dening under them! Why am I so changed? why does
my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words?
I'm sure I should be myself were I once among the
heather on those hills. . . .'

Or the elemental quality of Cathy's passionate nature,
and the hopelessness of its mating with Edgar, are sug-
gested by images which carry the thought beyond the
merely human:

*as well plant an oak tree in a flower pot and expect it
to thrive' . . . 'the sea could as easily be contained in
that horse trough. . . .'

Finally, the 'calm of mind, all passion spent' of the
beautiful ending, is the eternal peace of death and of a
perfect summer evening.

I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones
on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey, and
half buried in heath: Edgar Linton's only harmonised
by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliflf's
still bare.

I lingered round them, under that benign sky;
watched the moths fluttering among the heath and
harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through
the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine
unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

As LONG as the 'life' which the novelist felt he must
transmit to others was mainly concerned with man's re-
lation to the world he lives in, and to his fellow human
beings as long, that is, as the aim of the novel was
mainly a social one the technique which had been
gradually evolved from Fielding to Arnold Bennett was

THE NOVEL 137

adequate to express it. The changes which developed in
the course of time were refinements in the arrangement
and presentation of material, but the material itself re-
mained constant. Every novelist looked at it with an
individual pair of eyes, that was all. Even when Henry
James discovered the secret of exposing the drama of
the unspoken in the life of characters in fiction, he only
used it for the creation of a design of social inter-
relationships bound into a definite plot. There is nothing
free about the individual sensibility of a Henry James
character; only so much of its inner life is revealed as
is necessary for the completed pattern. It is always con-
cerned with the matter in hand: its thought processes
are logical and coherent.

Conrad transmitted his sense of the elusiveness of life
by a subtle and complicated handling of time sequences,
which is peculiarly his own. He loved to create the same
situation mirrored in many different minds at different
periods; to see the same person in many poses from
many different angles. And he loved to tell his story at
several removes from the main actors in it, and from the
present in which they are living: so much so indeed,
that at one point in Chance we are listening to what
Marlow said that Mrs. Fyne said that Flora said the
governess said!

But Conrad, too, is concerned with man's relation to
society: it was Proust who first showed the fascination
of the vision of man's relation to himself.

Naturally, man's memory of his own past has always
been the subject matter of fiction.

My school-days! The silent gliding on of my exist-
ence the unseen, unfelt progress of my life from
childhood up to youth! Let me think, as I look back
upon that flowing water, now a dry channel over-
grown with leaves, whether there are any marks along
its course, by which I can remember how it ran.

138 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

This is how Dickens approaches the subject, and the
result is, as always with Dickens, a marvellous series of
sharp-edged dramatic scenes. Or again, Dickens, and all
of us, know very well that trick of associative memory,
which is the basis of Proust's method in A la Recherche
du Temps Perdu.

There was a table, and a Dutch clock, and a chest of
drawers, and on the chest of drawers was a tea-tray
with a painting on it of a lady with a parasol taking a
walk with a military-looking child who was trundling
a hoop. . . . On the walls, there were some common-
coloured pictures, framed and glazed, of Scripture sub-
jects; such as I have never seen since in the hands of
pedlars, without seeing the whole interior of Peggotty's
brother's house again, at one view.

But no one before Proust used the memory of a single
individual as the focus for an entire vision of life, and
the central unity of a great work of art. And by some
magic of his own, he manages to do this without the loss
of any of the sense of universality. Life appears com-
plete in that revelation of a single consciousness; for its
vision of the world it lives in, wide in itself, is enor-
mously extended and enriched by its patient unfolding
of its own life of sensation and thought. The worlds of
novel and diary are united into one in the hands of a
great artist.

The artistic world of the other great innovator among
modern novelists, James Joyce, is entirely different.
Proust is personal and descriptive in his method; Joyce
is dramatic. He is not dramatic in the sense that Dickens
is, needless to say: he never creates anything approach-
ing a scene in the theatre. He has no interest in action;
his art is purely static; but it is dramatic because the
whole technique of Ulysses is based on the revelation
of character or of consciousness, rather through a

THE NOVEL 139

method created by Joyce himself, which is entirely in-
dependent of any conscious coloring of the personality
of the author.

Joyce sees human consciousness as the succession of
an infinite series of moments of sensation. Some of these
moments are the result of direct sense perceptions, some
are consciously formulated thoughts, some are the result
of memory, some are purely unconscious reactions. All
these fleeting moments lose their quality, he thinks, if
they are 'described/ and his technique consists in trying
to evoke their quality by the power of words and
images (that is, by a poetic use of language), instead of
describing them by any logical use of language.

These instants of sensation are, of course, discontinu-
ous and incoherent and eccentric; hence they cannot be
communicated in any external formal design. The unity
in them is something much harder to come by. It is a
certain rhythmical movement which dwells in them,
which determines their character and duration, and thus
creates 'personality.' (Virginia Woolf conveyed the same
sense in a much simplified form in The Waves.} The
technical device by which he suggests this is a series of
symbols and themes which recur at intervals in the
thought processes of Daedalus and Bloom; and they are
projected in a technique reminiscent of the cinema. The
scale constantly shifts, the picture expands and con-
tracts, the vision is sometimes normal, sometimes dis-
torted, as the focus of the camera changes. To the
exceptional reader this brings a vividly fresh and imme-
diate impression of living consciousness (though the
vision of experience given by Ulysses does not, I think,
bear very much relation to that of most of us) ; while to
the precise interpreter of it, the whole is apparently a
vast symphonic poem with a profound satiric intent, and
with a rigid technique controlling and directing its
complex creation of recurrent rhythms. To the average

i 4 o ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

reader, however, the effect of the book is to give a sense
of the total disintegration of life.

Indeed, most of us are far too solidly rooted in the
world of practical living and direct human relationship
to enjoy a complete shift in the novel to a world of pure
consciousness. We feel instinctively that we do not want
the novel to become something else, something unrelated
to life as we feel it and recognize it. We do not want
it to become a mere psychological document. We enjoy
an extension of its normal experiences, but not a substi-
tution of something else for them.

Hence, to the general reader, the work of John Do<?
Passos, for example, is of greater interest than that o*
Joyce. He is a disciple of Joyce in a great deal of his
writing notably in the sections called 'The Camera
Eye' in the unfinished novel of which the first two parts
only have been published but he uses many other ways
of writing, and his vision, though not so profound, is
far more varied and comprehensive.

Like Joyce, Dos Passos sees life as a vast succession of
impressions, but he allows these impressions to be de-
scribed as well as to be evoked by his use of symbolism.
Manhattan Transfer is a collection of moments in the
lives of a large company of persons, many of whom
have no relationship at all to the central figures in the
book. These moments, and the quality of the persons
who live them, stream across the consciousness of the
reader with kaleidoscopic variation. They form no regu-
lar pattern of plot, and the story which spins itself out
of the life of each individual must be put together from
the fleeting glimpses which is all we are permitted to
catch. We see a child talking to her father on a bench:
then we meet her next in a train with a man, who says,
'You're my wife now, Elaine,' and so we know she is
grown up and married. Dates have to be deduced from
topical allusions, and we are whirled bewilderingly from

THE NOVEL 141

place to place, from high to low, from group to group,
in homes and offices, ships and hospitals, restaurants,
shops and streets.

This disintegration of material is a symbol of the dis-
integration of the society depicted. For wherever we
find ourselves we meet the same standards. Against a
background of jazz, lust, drink, noise, glare, stench,
greed, grab, graft and publicity, everyone is scrambling
after the same selfish ambitions success, money, 'the
delusion of power. . . . Women fall for it like hell,'
'getting ahead.' There are faint gleams of human as-
piration, of moral and emotional beauty, and definite
reminders in the chapter headings of the exquisite
physical beauty of day and night and general environ-
ment in the midst of which this life plays itself out. But
they are all blotted out by the blind and brutal
monotony of a world without religion or serenity or
art or culture or permanence or peace or moral passion.

Criss-cross glances, sauntering hips, red jowls masti-
cating cigars, sallow, concave faces, flat bodies . . .
paunched bodies ... all elbowing, shoving, shuffling,
fed in two endless tapes through the revolving
doors. . . .

*I guess all he needs is to go to work and get a sense
of values, 5 says one of these characters of another: and
the irony of it is left to speak for itself.

At the end of the book, Jimmy Herf, whose stand-
point is presumably that of the author himself, walks
out of this life and into the unknown, but we have no
positive statement of what his own values are, though
they are implied clearly enough in the body of the book.
It is this lack of positive human standards that is the
quarrel which many readers have with the modern
novel. They complain that it never 'gets you anywhere'
(with the exception of the work of H. G. Wells, which

i 4 2 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

gets you to a different place every time!), that Joyce,
Huxley, Hemingway, Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis, all
so obsessed with the horrors of contemporary civiliza-
tion, do nothing beyond revealing these horrors over
and over again; and that these satirists of the modern
world give no sense of caring any more themselves for
the brotherhood of man, and the achievement of an
organic society, than any of the characters they satirize.

This is quite true, and is an illustration of the fact
that we cannot divorce the novel from moral pre-
occupations, or feel satisfied with mere skilful and in-
teresting technique. We admire Faulkner's uncanny
touch in suggesting the insane, or the abnormal, or the
primitive consciousness; we praise Hemingway's power
of implying the degrees of futility in characters whose
most positive moral flight is to say, 'You know it
makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch';
we admit Huxley's skill in the contrapuntal handling
of human themes, but we do not want to be very long
in the literary society of any of them. It is probably be-
cause Dos Passos, in spite of the bitterness of his cyni-
cism, leaves the impression of a pitiful and a positive
personality behind his creations, that his work appears
of greater significance than that of any other modern
American novelist; and it is for the same reason that a
similar position in England is held by Virginia Woolf.

Her range is much smaller than that of Dos Passos:
indeed her human territory is almost as limited as that
of Jane Austen, and small groups of people among the
upper middle classes are all she uses as material. But
within her limitations she is the most patient and perfect
of artists; the most intuitive and irradiating. Her own
personality is one of the most sympathetic and accom-
plished among writers of fiction. She said of Addison
that he was always on the side of sense, taste and civili-
zation, and it applies much more to herself. She has the

THE NOVEL 143

most lovely, luminous mind, and the most delicate and
mobile sensibility. In To the Lighthouse, which is my
own favorite among the novels, we find ourselves m a
perfectly familiar world. It is a world of knitting stock-
ings and cutting sandwiches and cooking vegetables; of
saving up to pay for the greenhouse roof, of shopping
and picnics and putting children to bed. Her characters
are all part of a web of normal human relationships;
beautiful emotions, ugly emotions, above all, mysterious
and inexplicable emotions bind them all one to another.
But what makes the world created in this work of art
unique is the way in which it is communicated to the
reader. It is not described directly; nor are we made
aware of the characters through the houses they live
in or the whole social background against which they
live. Everything about them is revealed to us as they
live from moment to moment. All their memory of the
past, as well as all their awareness of the present, flows
into the reader's mind from that source. What a lot of
Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay we know from the few moments
we spend with them on an evening walk.

They turned away from the view and began to walk
up the path where the silver-green spear-like plants
grew, arm in arm. His arm was almost like a young
man's arm, Mrs. Ramsay thought, thin and hard, and
she thought with delight how strong he still was, though
he was over sixty, and how untamed and optimistic, and
how strange it was that being convinced, as he was, of
all sorts of horrors, seemed not to depress him, but to
cheer him. Was it not odd, she reflected? Indeed he
seemed to her sometimes made differently from other
people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary
things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like
an eagle's. His understanding often astonished her. But
did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view?
No. . . . He would sit at table with them like a person

144 EN JOYMENT OF LITERATURE

in a dream. And his habit of talking aloud, or saying
poetry aloud, was growing on him, she was afraid; for
sometimes it was awkward

Best and brightest, come away!

poor Miss Giddings, when he shouted that at her, almost
jumped out of her skin. But then, Mrs. Ramsay, though
instantly taking his side against all the silly Gid-
dingses in the world, then, she thought, intimating by
a little pressure on his arm that he walked up hill too
fast for her, and she must stop for a moment to see
whether those were fresh mole-hills on the bank, then,
she thought, stooping down to look, a great mind like
his must be different in every way from ours. ... It
might be a rabbit; it might be a mole. Some creature
anyhow was ruining her Evening Primroses. And look-
ing up, she saw above the thin trees* the first pulse of
the full-throbbing star, and wanted to make her hus-
band look at it; for the sight gave her such keen
pleasure. But she stopped herself. He never looked at
things. If he did, all he would say would be, Poor little
world, with one of his sighs.

At that moment, he said, 'Very fine,' to please her,
and pretended to admire the flowers. But she knew quite
well that he did not admire them, or even realise that
they were there. It was only to please her. . . . Ah, but
was not that Lily Briscoe strolling along with William
Bankes. . . . Yes, indeed it was. Did not that mean
that they would marry? Yes, it must! What an ad-
mirable idea! They must marry!

But though the vision of life in To the Light home is
that of a succession of such passing moments, seen
through the consciousness of one or other of the char-
acters, or directly through that of the author, she does
not leave either her vision of life itself, or her revelation
of it in her art, disintegrated or chaotic. In a sense, To
the Lighthouse is also a novel on the theme of time. We
have the same enveloping sense of its inexorable move-

THE NOVEL 145

ment as we get in The Old Wives' Tale by such very
different means, of the way it drops leaf upon leaf, fold
upon fold on human beings, softly, ceaselessly. But just
as the essence of art is, by the creation of Form, to give
an impression of eternal symmetry and stability to the
amorphous experiences of life, so the essence of life it-
self (says Virginia Woolf), is to integrate itself into
moments which hold, too, within themselves an impres-
sion of eternal symmetry and stability. Mrs. Ramsay,
presiding at her dinner table, has a moment of such re-
vealing insight:

Everything seemed right. Just now (but this cannot
last, she thought, dissociating herself from the moment
while they were all talking about boots) just now she
had reached security; she hovered like a hawk sus-
pended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which
filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not
noisily, solemnly rather, for it arose, she thought, look-
ing at them all eating there, from husband and children
and friends; all of which rising in this profound stillness
(she was helping William Bankes to one very small piece
more and peered into the depths of the earthenware
pot) seemed now for no special reason to stay there like
a smoke, like a fume rising upwards, holding them safe
together. . . . There it was, all round them. It par-
took, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a spe-
cially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt
about something different once before that afternoon;
there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she
meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she
glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected
lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spec-
tral, like a ruby; . . . Of such moments, she thought,
the thing is made that remains for ever after. This
would remain.

Whether we agree or disagree with this philosophy,
its presence in the book, fusing all its themes, unifying

146 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

all its emotional variety, gives it coherence and com-
pleteness as a work of art, and it is the lack of any such
integrating vision of life which has made the work of so
many of the new experimenters in the technique of fic-
tion seem trivial and unsatisfying.

EPIC AND NARRATIVE POETRY

T

JLo

-0 MOST of us the word 'epic' suggests Homer, and
not Homer in the original, but through the medium of
some translation. The scope of this book does not allow
a detailed discussion of any translations, but it is impos-
sible not to say something of the epics which have cre-
ated all subsequent ideas about that form of poetry, and
which immutably fixed its type.

No doubt The Iliad and The Odyssey were preceded
by a large body of oral poetry, war ballads and such-
like, recited or sung by minstrels in the houses of the
chiefs whose ancestors they celebrated, and handed
down from generation to generation by verbal tradition.
Odysseus declares that he thinks these recitals are among
the chief joys of life:

Verily it is a good thing to list to a minstrel such as
this, like to the gods in voice. Nay, as for me, I say that
there is no more gracious or perfect delight than when
a whole people makes merry, and the men sit orderly at
feast in the halls and listen to the singer, and the tables
by them are laden with bread and flesh, and a wine-
bearer drawing the wine serves it round and pours it
into the cups. This seems to me well-nigh the fairest
thing in the world.

These folk ballads provided a body of epic material,
just as in England some two thousand years later the
Arthurian legends provided a body of epic material, but
in prehistoric Greece the appearance of a great poet, or
perhaps of two great poets, with the Greek genius for

M7

i 4 8 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

symmetry and proportion and grace, transformed this
material into two living and imperishable works of art.
The action, characters and background of the poems
are those of what we vaguely call the Heroic Age. The
figures of heroes and gods, created simply and without
any psychological subtlety, play their parts in camps
and battlefields full of heroic fighting, or in courts and
homes full of feasting and hospitality on an equally he-
roic scale. Action is the mainspring of life: the men
fight and travel and administer their lands, and the
women spin and weave and wash and tend their homes.
The writing lives in its vivid, picturesque quality. If we
think of Homer, we think of a scene such as that of the
Trojan watchfires.

Even as when in heaven the stars" about the bright
moon shine clear to see, when the air is windless, and
all the peaks appear, and the tall headlands and glades,
and from heaven breaketh open the infinite air, and all
stars are seen, and the shepherd's heart is glad; even in
like multitudes between the ships and the streams of
Xanthos appeared the watchfires that the Trojans
kindled in front of Ilios. A thousand fires burned in the
plain and by the side of each sate fifty in the gleam of
blazing fire. And the horses champed white barley and
spelt, and standing by the chariots waited for the
throned Dawn.

Or of that of Nausicaa and her maidens washing.

Now when they were come to the beautiful stream of
the river, where the bright water welled up free from be-
neath, and flowed past, enough to wash the foulest gar-
ments clean, there the girls unharnessed the mules from
under the chariot, and turning them loose, they drove
them along the banks of the eddying river to graze on
the honey-sweet clover. Then they took the garments
from the wain, in their hands, and bore them to the
black water, and briskly trod them down in the

EPIC AND NARRATIVE POETRY 149

trenches, in busy rivalry. Now when they had washed
and cleansed all the stains, they spread all out in order
along the shore of the deep, even where the sea, in beat-
ing on the coast, washed the pebbles clean. Then having
bathed and anointed them well with olive oil, they took
their mid-day meal on the river's banks, waiting till
the clothes should dry in the brightness of the sun.

Or of the racy, Robinson Crusoe-ish realism of the
story of the outwitting of the Cyclops, with its vivid
details of exactly how he milked his goats and set his
cheeses to drain 'all orderly'; and exactly how he
cracked the skulls of his victims and supped off them to
the last shred; followed by the swift, supple narrative
of the blinding and the escape.

But though it is endless incidents of this sort, and
exquisite little pictures by the way, of sea and birds and
flowers and jewellery and clothes and interiors, which
jump to the memory when we think of The Iliad or The
Odyssey, they are not just collections of stirring stories
and excellent descriptions. 'The noble and profound
application of ideas to life is the most essential part of
poetic greatness,' said Matthew Arnold, and behind the
stones and descriptions of Homer there is a mind which
sees and feels in these detached incidents of men's expe-
rience a picture of the destiny of the human race; which
concentrates in them a complete, if primitive vision of
human life. 'This is the lot the gods have spun for mis-
erable men, that they should live in pain; yet themselves
are sorrowless.' So says Achilles, and indeed, all the mor-
tals in Homer are the sport of gods and goddesses who
organize their fates according to their own private
wishes and personal favoritisms. But it is Virgil who
sums up the epic values. 'For all men the period of life
is short and not to be recalled, but to spread glory by
deeds, that is what valour can do.' The author of the
Homeric poems accepts the general circumstances of his

i 5 o ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

time, but from his picture of that bygone civilization
there emerges a sense of a central significance which he
feels within all human existence. The subject matter of
The Iliad is the life of war, with all its practical impli-
cations and consequences; the subject matter of The
Odyssey is the life of personal adventure, and its oppo-
site, the longing for home and safety: and in all this,
which includes in its scope the whole experience of man,
the poet symbolizes his attitude to living, creating in
illustration after illustration his conviction that the ul-
timate moral and emotional value of life is the courage
with which it is lived, in the face of the inscrutable
power of the gods and the inexorable end of death.

THE classical epic is the root from which all European
narrative poetry springs, but in its growth and develop-
ment it puts out as many branches as there are ways of
telling a story in verse, and the examples of the true
epic tradition become rarer and rarer as civilization be-
comes more and more complex, and literary art more
and more sophisticated.

It is clear that the great days of the story-teller in
verse are the ages when the reading public does not
exist; the days when court or camp or household de-
pended for their literary amusement on the professional
bard or minstrel. So, in England, the old epic of Beowulf
must have become familiar, with its mixture of history
and legend, fact and fable; its central heroic figure of
Beowulf, the noble fighter, the wise councillor, the loyal
friend; and its call to courage in the face of a fate as
bleak and comfortless as the atmosphere of cold, grey
fog and the mists of the marshes which envelop it. So,
too, must the old ballads, the epics of the common folk,
have circulated in the countryside, with their records

EPIC AND NARRATIVE POETRY 151

of famous local heroes such as Robin Hood, of famous
local battles such as Chevy Chace, and of macabre or
romantic incidents such as the tale of Rendel or of the
nut-brown maid. So, too, must the romances, introduced
by the French conquerors of the land, have become pop-
ular. Here the whole human atmosphere, as well as the
character of the background, has become changed. The
old epic material of warfare and wandering, of talk be-
tween heroes, and individual combats with men and
monsters, evidently loses its hold on the interest of the
audience, and is replaced, or enlarged, by all the stuff
of chivalry. Women and love, and the whole romantic
code which made them the center of the new ideal, usurp
the stage. There is no characterization in the new nar-
rative fashion, but there is all the clarity and color
which Beowulf completely lacks. Shadowy scenes and
vague outlines give place to vivid vignettes of sport,
ritual, tournament and revelry. It is not as literature we
look at these romances, indeed; it is as tapestry, or as the
colors in an illuminated missal. Sunlight glitters on
shields and helmets, flowers bloom in gay gardens, blood
'blinks' on the snow, sun and moon both give their ra-
diance, the sky is blue and the grass green, while within
doors the candlelight gleams on the golden hair of lovely
ladies, and on the rich stuff of their dresses and the soft
glow of their jewels.

It would be idle to pretend that any modern audience
could possibly enjoy the vast bulk of the early romance
literature as reading matter. The evenings in the me-
dieval castle were long, social intercourse was difficult,
roads and conveyances rudimentary and amusements
few. The most important thing about the entertainment
provided by the minstrel to lighten this monotonous
isolation was that it should be lengthy. Form was of
no consequence at all economy and arrangement alike
unnecessary. It did not much matter how bizarre and

i 5 2 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

incongruous the incidents were, how monotonous the
adventures, how improbable the encounters, as long as
the recital of them filled up a certain number of hours.

It was Chaucer who gave artistic unity to the material
of medieval romance, and who showed in The Knight's
Tale how that material could be condensed and arranged
and presented with the cunning use of light and shade,
of perspective and proportion. The material, however,
remained as wooden and inhuman as ever. But in
Troilus and Criseyde, in spite of its intolerable length
for the modern reader, he illustrated how the romance
world could really be peopled with human beings.
Troilus, it is true, is just the same parfit gentil knight
as Palamon or Arcite, but Criseyde, dark, sideways-
glancing, sensual, beautiful and plausible, selfish and
shallow, is no typical romantic heroine with yard-long
plaits of golden hair and lips red as a rose. And Pan-
darus, with his officiousness and his feeble jokes, his
bromidic platitudes and his apologetic 'cophes/ comes
straight out of the world of satiric comedy. Chaucer
brought romance to the level of everyday life and the
standards of reality. He looked at it with the eyes of the
man of the world and left it to future ages as the mate-
rial for drama as much as for epic.

When it was handled again by a great artist in words,
it lives in yet another atmosphere. Spenser wrote when
the Renaissance had flooded men's consciousness with a
whole range of new artistic and sensuous values, and his
picture of the Bowre of Blisse illustrates them very well,
with its little lake, paved with jasper and set about with
the dark laurel trees, which emphasize the whiteness of
the girls' naked bodies bathing in it.

Sometimes the one would lift the other quight
Above the waters, and then downe againe
Her plong, as over-maystered by might,

EPIC AND NARRATIVE POETRY 153

Where both awhile would covered remaine,

And each the other from to rise restraine;

The whiles their snowy limbes, as through a vele,

So through the christall waves appeared plaine:

Then suddenly both would themselves unhele,

And th j amarous sweet spoiles to greedy eyes revele.

How different from Chaucer, with his chivalrous reserve:

This Emelye with herte debonaire

Hir body wesshe with water of a welle;

But how she did her rite I dare nat telle . . .

To put this beside Spenser's Bowre of Blisse, and the
background of Spenser beside the clear red and white
flowers in Emelye's garden in The Knight's Tale, or the
formal shady alleys and sanded paths in Criseyde's, is to
compare the vivid, flat coloring of an illuminated man-
uscript with a Botticelli.

But Spenser, too, suffered from the prolixity and
verbosity which seem to be almost inseparable from ro-
mance themes, and in England it is not until the tales of
chivalry again became a fashionable subject for narra-
tive poetry three hundred years later, that we find
romance treated with a sense of style. Perhaps The Eve
of St. Agnes is really the perfect medieval romance! It
has achieved the atmosphere of the real thing without
its manifold weaknesses. It tells a fairy-tale perfectly.
It makes no effort at human verisimilitude; it concen-
trates itself on the quality which makes the great appeal
of the medieval convention the picturesque. There is
no poem in the English language where words are made
to do the work of paint and music so triumphantly as
they are in The Eve of St. Agnes, no poem where they
create every kind of sense suggestion with such match-
less vividness, and combine and contrast them with such
consummate skill./

The first four stanzas create the background for the

154 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

whole. At once the reader delivers himself, with a sigh
of complete confidence, into the hands of a supreme
artist in the picturesque. He sees the shivering animals
in the snowy landscape, the frosted breath of the beads-
man, the sculptured dead, aching in icy hoods and
mails, the carved angels 'with hair blown back, and
wings put crosswise on their breasts.' He hears the burst
of argent revelry, the golden music, yearning like a god
in pain, and the chiding of the silver-snarling trumpets.
The human figures, too, are conceived and presented
entirely in terms of sight and sound, of touch and taste.
Madeline, 'hoodwink'd with faery fancy,' watching with
downcast eyes the sweeping trains of the revellers: Por-
phyro, with 'purple riot' in his heart, in that little pale,
lattic'd, chill moonlight room: old Angela feeling for
the stair with her palsied hand; and^ finally the scene in
Madeline's room, which is the very sum and zenith and
apex and pinnacle of all we mean by the word romance.

A casement high and triple-arch J d there was,
All garlanded with carven imag'ries
Of fruits and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven: Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

EPIC AND NARRATIVE POETRY 155

Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay,
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppressed
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away;
Flown, like a thought until the morrow-day;
Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain;
Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.

Then by the bedside, where the faded moon
Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set
A table, and, half anguish'd, threw thereon
A cloth of woven crimson, gold and jet:
O for some drowsy Morphean amulet!
The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion,
The kettle-drum and far-heard clarionet,
Affray his ears, though but in dying tone:
The hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth and lavender'd,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.

IT MAY be objected to this kind of poetry, that it is very
limited in its appeal and has no human interest. This is
perfectly true. I know no narrative poem in the whole
range of English and American literature in whose char-
acters one takes more than the faintest degree of real
interest. If one does, as in Troilus and Criseyde or The

i 5 * ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

Ring and the Book, one wishes the material were pre-
sented in the form of drama or prose fiction and not in
verse. But the truth is, one does not read narrative
poetry for that kind of interest. The pleasure of reading
it is the pleasure of partaking of one sort or another of
literary artifice, and the way to enjoy such poems is to
regard them as 'period pieces' and to study them purely
as works of art.

Nowadays, the general interest in psychology and the
development of prose fiction into the complex and sen-
sitive instrument it now is, have killed the interest in
the subject matter of narrative poetry for the mature
reader. Not, of course, for the adolescent reader. Most
of us pass through a stage and a very excellent stage
it is too in the development of our taste, when we get
a real thrill from reading Marmion* and The Lays of
Ancient Rome, from the Eastern tales of Byron and The
Earthly Paradise: even (let us whisper) from The
Idylls of the Kingl But the taste for second-rate nar-
rative poetry, whether it is the poetry of Tennyson or
of Morris or of Masefield, is an unsophisticated taste; we
grow out of it. But we never grow out of the enjoyment
of watching a great artist in words use his medium
with supreme skill in the creation of situation or pic-
ture.

In a poem such as Marlowe's Hero and Leander, for
instance, what captivates the imagination of the reader
is not the fable (which he knows already), or the per-
sonalities of the actors in it (which are quite null and
void) , but the pleasure of seeing a superb example of a
particular type of the poetry of embellishment of that
gorgeous and sensuous Renaissance fashion of writing,
which reminds him of the qualities of a Cellini cup or
of the glories of the exterior staircase at the chateau of
Blois.

EPIC AND NARRATIVE POETRY 157

Leander now like Theban Hercules,

Entred the orchard of th' Hesperides,

Whose fruit none rightly can describe but hee

That puls or shakes it from the golden tree:

And now she wisht this night were never done,

And sigh'd to think upon th* approching sunne,

For much it greev'd her that the bright day-light

Should know the pleasure of this blessed night. . .

And fain by stealth away she would have crept,

And to some corner secretly have gone,

Leaving Leander in the bed alone.

But as her naked foot was whipping out,

He on the suddaine cling'd her so about,

That Meremaid-like unto the floore she slid,

One halfe appear'd, the other halfe was hid.

Thus neere the bed she blushing stood upright,

And from her countenance behold ye might

A kind of twilight breake, which through the heare,

As from an orient cloud, glymse here and there.

And round about the chamber this false morne

Brought foorth the day before the day was borne.

So Heroes ruddie cheeks Hero betray'd,

And her all naked to his sight display'd . . .

By this Apollos golden harp began

To sound foorth music to the ocean,

Which watchful Hesperus no sooner heard,

But he the day bright-bearing car prepar'd,

And ran before, as Harbenger of light,

And with his flaring beames mockt ougly night,

Till she overcome with anguish, shame, and rage,

Dang'd l downe to hell her loathsome carnage.

Or again, take a fashion at the other extreme of poetic
convention, Pope's The Rape of the Lock. Narrative
poetry must always be aimed at a special audience, for
its popularity depends upon its pleasing the reading pub-
lic of the day. Hero and Leander was written for a cul-

1 hurled.

158 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

tivated, well-read court audience, with a special taste
for Italianate, luxurious and erotic verse. Pope, writing
over a hundred years later, aimed at a completely dif-
ferent reading public. Luscious emotional suggestion
was no longer the fashion at all: the ideal was a public
and social one, the subject matter the personalities of
the social and political worlds, and the standard of
accomplishment a clever sophistication which anyone
of general well-bred intelligence could appreciate. Gos-
sip and scandal are the greatest excitements of the civi-
lized community, just as warfare is of the uncivilized,
and Pope is the most brilliant scandal-monger and gossip
among poets. The Rape of the Lock, moreover, is not
only a brilliant satire on the social world, it is an equally
brilliant one on the literary world. The eighteenth cen-
tury, with its passion for 'the ancients,' was very
familiar with the whole epic convention. It was partic-
ularly rich in bad epics itself, and Pope makes the
framework of his poem a parody of the epic tradition.
As in it, he creates a hierarchy of supernatural beings
who concern themselves with the fates of the chief char-
acters, while the combats, the descriptions, the elaborate
similes and images of the serious epic all appear in a
burlesque form. It is all very good fun, and would ob-
viously be very much better for its own contemporary
society, who knew of the episode which provided its
plot, and could point the topical allusions and fix the
personalities in a way which is impossible for a modern
reader. The modern reader can appreciate with undimin-
ished enjoyment, however, the delicate, brittle perfection
of its quality, the formal deftness of its arrangement,
its descriptive vigor and skill, and the economy, point
and sparkle of its versification. Take the end of the
description of Belinda and the statement of the central
point of the poem.

EPIC AND NARRATIVE POETRY 159

If to her share some female errors fall,
Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all.

This Nymph, to the destruction of mankind,
Nourish'd two locks, which graceful hung behind
In equal curls, and well conspir'd to deck
With shining ringlets the smooth iv'ry neck.
Love in these labyrinths his slaves detains,
And mighty hearts are held in slender chains.
With hairy springes we the birds betray,
Slight lines of hair surprise the finny prey,
Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare,
And beauty draws us with a single hair.

Th' advcnt'rous Baron the bright locks admir'd;
He saw, he wish'd, and to the prize aspir'd.
Resolv'd to win, he meditates the way,
By force to ravish, or by fraud betray;
For when success a Lover's toil attends,
Few ask if fraud or force attain'd his ends.

For this, ere Phoebus rose, he had implor'd
Propitious heav'n, and ev'ry pow'r ador'd,
But chiefly Love to Love an Altar built,
Of twelve vast French Romances, neatly gilt.
There lay three garters, half a pair of gloves,
And all the trophies of his former loves;
With tender Billet-doux he lights the pyre,
And breathes three am'rous sighs to raise the fire.
Then prostrate falls, and begs with ardent eyes
Soon to obtain, and long possess the prize:
The pow'r s gave car, and granted half his pray'r,
The rest, the wind dispers'd in empty air.

THE Rape of the Lock is full of echoes of Milton, and
it is time to leave the discussion of minor narrative verse,
however perfect of its kind, and to say something of the
greatest English epic.

1*0 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

After I have been reading Paradise Lost I can take up
no other poet with satisfaction. . . . Averse as I am to
everything relating to theology, and especially the view
of it thrown open by this poem, I recur to it incessantly
as the noblest specimen in the world of eloquence, har-
mony and genius.

So Landor summed up his feelings towards Milton, and
it is difficult not to agree with him. At the same time,
Paradise Lost is more praised than read. Modern readers
are apt, to put it vulgarly, to find Milton a tough prop-
osition, and the reasons lor. this are obvious. Not only is
his use of language difficult, and his learning so immense
that the complete understanding of Paradise Lost has
been called 'thejast reward of consummate scholarship/
but it is impossible for the modern reader to identify
himself with Milton's point of view^ towards his subject
matter. The dialectic and argument seem often tedious
and dull to our agnostic and hedonistic agej and the
actual theology belongs to a scheme of faith now as
dead among cultivated readers as the mythologies of
Homer or Virgil.

But this view is really somewhat superficial. For the
moral framework of Paradise Lost is not really a theo-
logical one at all. It is a personal one, and the poem, un-
like the great epics of the ancient world, is saturated
with individual passion. It is Milton himself, and the
intellectual and emotional fruit of his own experience of
life, which is the central and animating force of the
whole poem/He accepts the whole Biblical story of the
war in heaven and the fall of tfie angels', and the history
of the creation and of the fall of man, but the story as
he tells it is not ortly enriched and expanded with the
whole of his own vast knowledge of ancient and mod-
ern learning and literature, it is also affected very radi-
cally by his own emotional nature. For instance, Mil-
ton's own view of the relationship of men and women

EPIC AND NARRATIVE POETRY 161

colors the whole creation of the figures of Adam and
Eve, and the dramatic and realistic details of their emo-
tional reactions after the Fall; 'and it is Milton's own
conviction of the doom of the world

^X' so shall the world go on,

To good malignant, to bad men benign.

which causes his conventional account of the millen-
nium to ring so false. But above all, it is his admiration
for, and belief in, the positive virtues of courage and
endurance, in the 'dust and heat* of struggle and fail-
ure, which influence the whole poem so profoundly. For
Milton was a rebel, with a fiercely independent and un-
conquerable spirit, with the result that he comes peril-
ously near upsetting the whole balance of his fable
when he pours all his own pride and courage, vigor and
indomitable determination under defeat, into the figure
of the arch-rebel against the Almighty Satan. Listen to
him as he assumes the tas_k of finding Earth and seduc-
ing Man from his allegiance to God.

O Progeny of Heaven! Empyreal Thrones!
With reason hath deep silence and demur
Seized us, though undismayed. Long is the way
And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light.
Our prison strong, this huge convex of fire,
Outrageous to devour, immures us round
Ninefold; and gates of burning adamant,
Barred over us, prohibit all egress.
These passed, if any pass, the void profound
Of unessential Night receives him next,
Wide-gaping, and with utter loss of being
Threatens him, plunged in that abortive gulf.
If thence he scape, into whatever world,
Or unknown region, what remains him less
Than unknown dangers, and as hard escape?
But I should ill become this throne, O Peers,
And this imperial sovranty, adorned

162 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

With splendour, armed with power, if aught proposed

And judged of public moment in the shape

Of difficulty or danger, could deter

Me from attempting. Wherefore do I assume

These royalties, and not refuse to reign,

Refusing to accept as great a share

Of hazard as of honour, due alike

To him who reigns, and so much to him due

Of hazard more as he above the rest

High honoured sits?

But Satan does not quite succeed in upsetting the
balance of the whole, and the action remains with all
the sinewy strength and resilience of a great piece of
architectural planning; secure and confident in the
possession of the essential qualities* of epic greatness
dignity, clarity, variety and solidity of -effect. For with-
out greatness of action there can be no greatness. Mat-
thew Arnold has stated this case better than anyone
else. What are the eternal objects of poetry, he asks, in
the Preface to his own poems, and he replies that they
are human actions, and that the quality of the action is
all important. That, he says, is what the Greeks (and
we may add, Milton) understood so clearly: and
whereas in modern times the tendency is to subordinate
the whole to the parts, and to allow the beauties by the
way to usurp the chief part of the reader's attention, all
really great poetry subordinates the parts to the whole.
The action predominates over the expression of it, the
expression draws its force directly from the pregnancy
of the matter which it conveys. Only in this way, by
the penetrating power of some noble and significant
plot, can the unity and profundity of impression be
won, which is the hallmark of great writing. Nor can
the unity of impression be profound unless the pattern
of the external action be matched by a universal moral

EPIC AND NARRATIVE POETRY 163

and emotional pattern by which the whole of the poet's
being is penetrated and absorbed.

It is this profound unity of impression which Milton
has achieved.

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss fiiLEden, til] one_^r l it^ r Man
. Restore us, t and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse . . .

That is the theme, and the central point, the crisis of
the whole epic scheme, is that moment in the ninth
book . . .

So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth-reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat.
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe
That all was lost.

Everything else in the poem is shown in its relation-
ship to that supreme moment. The action starts with
the birth and idea of the fall of man in the fallen
Satan's mind in Hell. Then follows the effect in Heaven
of the knowledge that man is to fall, and the offer of
the Son of God to be man's redeemer. By the close of
the third book the whole scheme is foreshadowed and
the shape of the action is already ordered in the reader's
mind. From then on, it shifts to Earth and is stabilized
and harmonized there; and finally, when the conse-
quences of the Fall have been shown, it is finally re-
solved in the mind of man. Adam is humbled and con-
trite,

Henceforth I know that to obey is best,
and as those two sad figures, with wandering steps and

1 64 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

slow, turn their backs upon the garden, and take their
solitary way, it is with the assurance that their diso-
bedience and the knowledge of good and evil has made
possible an infinitely larger hope,

A Paradise within thee, happier far.

It is this unity of external design and of the moral
order behind it, which creates the overwhelming force
of Paradise Lost that sense of grandeur which Dr.
Johnson called its 'gigantic loftiness of port/ Whether
the reader shares the doc trmaT elements in Milton's
faith is really of no consequence at all, for in the poem
those elements have been fused, with everything else
in Milton's nature, into an immortal work of art 'the
noblest specimen in the world/ And the reader who is
capable of appreciating that will find/ like Landor, that
his delight in it cannot be touched by any questions of
theology.

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S argument about the importance
of action and of moral impression in poetry is an in-
teresting one in the light of modern developments, for
the position of the modern poet in relation to tradi-
tional epic material is very different from that of the
'ancients' or of Milton. Heroic qualities remain the
same: stories of courage, loyalty and self-sacrifice move
mankind now in the same way in which they always
have done, but the interests of mankind have neverthe-
less shifted. We are in an age of individualism. We care
more** for the problems of the personality than for
those of the nation or the race, and though it is obvious
that no age of modern civilization could return to the
character of the primitive life and faiths upon which the
earliest epics are based, or to the character of the con-
crete theology which Milton could accept, it is never-

EPIC AND NARRATIVE POETRY 165

theless essential that the interests of that primitive
world in the large elemental passions and moral ques-
tions should in some sort be present, for epic poetry to
be possible. The complexities of the modern attitude to
life make this very difficult. Elaborate and complicated
psychology is the very antithesis of the simplicity of
epic outlines. And not only has the character of life,
and the study of it, completely changed, but the posi-
tion of the poet within it has changed too. The poet is
now free. He is no longer the servant of any external
authority who can control his services, as the profes-
sional minstrel was bound to be: nor is he forced to
make use of traditional material and to create within
the rigid outlines of accepted fact or of an accepted
scheme of abstract thought or moral code. But this free-
dom seems to have proved a hindrance rather than a
help to the creation of great narrative poetry. On the
one hand, the poet's view of the past, and that of his
audience too, is now complicated by questions of sym-
bolism, of scientific truth and historical accuracy which
the poets of the past never dreamed of. They were at
one with their material, its relation to them was poetic
relationship only: its physical, emotional and moral as-
pects were their own and were fixed and immovable. On
the other hand, how is the modern poet to universalize a
modern theme, so that it reaches epic significance and
dignity? He may analyze and moralize and argue about
life and art, and produce The Testament of Bccmty, or
he may create a moving story full of haunting rhythms,
like Archibald MacLeish's Conquistador, or he may
forge a very vigorous, muscular verse narrative, full
of body and breath, color and movement, like John
Brown's Body. No one who enjoys poetry could read
John Brown's Body without pleasure and interest. I
do not know if Stephen Benet has succeeded in track-
ing down 'the pure elixir, the American thing' which

166 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

he tried to capture, but he has certainly written some-
thing memorable. It belongs to its own age, it has noth-
ing imitative and second-hand about it, and it is full
of simplicity and distinction. Take the scene where
Jack Ellyat looks at the sleeping camp at dawn at the
men whom, by day, he hates for their coarseness and
dirt of body and mind.

The camp was asleep.
All that length of tents still asleep. He could see through

the tents.

He could see all those sleeping, rough, lousy, detested men
Laden with sleep us with soft, leaden burdens laden,
Movelessly lying between the brown fawns of sleep
Like infants nuzzled against the flanks of a doe,
In quietness slumbering, in a warm quietness. . . .

And he was alone,

And for a moment, could see this, and see them so,
And, being free, stand alone, and so being free
To love or hate, do neither, but merely stand
Above them like sleep and sec them with untouched eyes.
In a while they would wake, and he would hate them again.

But though the poem is full of fine passages, it never-
theless altogether lacks something which the classical
epics and Milton possess that welding of an external
action with a background of universal values. The fore-
ground is vivid with actuality:

Black months of war, hard-featured, defeated months

Between Fair Oaks and Gettysburg,

What is your tale for this army?

What do the men,

So differently gathered for your word to devour,

Say to your ears, deaf with cannon? . . .

Let us read old letters awhile,

Let us try to hear

The thin, forgotten voices of men forgotten

EPIC AND NARRATIVE POETRY 167

Crying out of torn scraps of paper . . .

... in a single voice that says over and over

'It is cold. It is wet. We marched till we couldn't stand up.

It is muddy here. I wish you could see us here.

I wish everybody at home could see us here,

They would know what war is like.'

But any general sweep of thought pattern becomes per-
sonal and enfeebled.

I heard the song of breath

And lost it in all sharp voices,

Even my own voice lost,

Lost like a skein of air,

And with it, continents lost

In the great throat of Death. . . .

The continents flow and melt
Like wax in the naked candle,
Burnt by the wick of time.
Where is the breath of the Chaldees,
The dark Minoan breath? . . .

To use an unfashionable word, the poem lacks a soul,
just as Wordsworth's The Excursion or Shelley's Pro-
metheus Unbound or Bridges' Testament of Beauty
lack a body. But if, as Lascelles Abercrombie says, the
epic must be 'a summation, for its time, of the values of
life,' it must include in its scope both nobility and dig-
nity of action and a design of cosmic significance which
sets that action against a background larger than itself.
Only thus can its form, its totality of effect, possess the
power of great poetry.

There is one modern poem which does this: The
Dynasts.

Hardy called the poem an epic drama, but he declared
that it was 'intended simply for mental performance/
so that it is fair to judge it as reading matter only. Its

i68 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

subject is the Napoleonic campaigns, and its dramatic
movement is of the simplest. There is no subtlety, or
emphasis on human individualities: men in action is the
theme, and the scene ranges over the continent of
Europe, in any country, town, battlefield, street or
room the poet chooses. There is an equal width and
variety of actors, and the stage is crowded with men
and women from emperors to yokels and from queens
to prostitutes.

The main action is presented in blank verse: blank
verse which is not impressive, which, indeed, is deliber-
ately colorless and flat, but which serves to isolate the
action from the ordinary prose world and give it dig-
nity and outline. But Hardy's unique effects are gained
by his creation of an original framework of abstract
thought, in whose intellectual and emotional light we
see the whole historical action, and by his use of a num-
ber of technical devices which enlarge and intensify the
dramatic present of his scenes.

The opening scene, which is in the Overworld, intro-
duces the phantasmal Intelligences which are Hardy's
hierarchy of supernatural beings. 'What of the Imma-
nent Will and Its designs?' asks the Shade of the Earth,
and the Spirit of the Years replies:

It works unconsciously) as heretofore,

Eternal artistries in Circumstance,

Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote,

Seem in themselves Its single listless aim,

And not their consequence.

Spirit of the Pities

Why doth It so and so, and ever so,

This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel'?

The spirits continue their discussion, which ends with
a general chorus of Intelligences.

EPIC AND NARRATIVE POETRY 169

We'll close up Time, as a bird its van,

We'll traverse Space, as spirits can,

Link pjilses severed by leagues and years,

Bring cradles into touch with biers;
So that the far-off Consequence appears

Prompt at the heel of foregone Cause.

The Prime, that willed ere war en ess was.
Whose Brain perchance is Space, whose Thought its laws,

Which we as threads and streams discern,

We may but miise on, never learn.

In the final chorus of the poem, Hardy voices a very
half-hearted hope

That the rages
Of the ages
Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that

were,

Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashions all things
fair!

But the destiny which presides over the whole action
is best illustrated by his image of the

knitter drowsed
Whose fingers ply with skilled unmindf illness.

After the opening scene in the Overworld, Hardy
introduces us to one of his technical devices, the stage
directions, as it were, for the drama.

The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated
figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and the branching mountain
chains like ribs, the peninsula plateau of Spain forming a head. Broad
and lengthy lowlands stretch from the north of France across Russia
like a grey-green garment hemmed by the Ural mountains and the glisten-
ing Arctic Ocean.

The point of view then sinks downwards through space, and draws
near to the surface of the perturbed countries, where the peoples, dis-
tressed by events which they did not cause, are seen writhing, crawling,
heaving, and vibrating in their various cities and nationalities.

1 70 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

Sometimes Hardy will push his device still further and
use it to emphasize his phantasmagoric background, as
he does in his description of the battle of Austerlitz.

... A preternatural clearness possesses the atmosphere of the battle-field,
in which the scene becomes anatomi/ed and the living masses of humanity
transparent. The controlling Immanent Will appears therein, as a brain-
like network of currents and ejections, twitching, interpenetrating, en-
tangling, and thrusting hither and thither the human forms.

The possibilities of ironic effects in creating thus a God's
eye view of human actions are obvious, and these descrip-
tive interludes, with the 'dumb show' which frequently
follows them, add an extraordinary intensity and vivid-
ness to the actual dramatic scenes. Take the scene at
Walcheren.

A marshy island at the mouth of the Scheldt, *lit by the low suivhinc
of an evening in late summer. The hori/ontal rays from the west lie
in yellow sheaves across the vapours that the day's heat has drawn from
the sweating soil. Sour grasses grow in places, and strange fishy smells,
now warm, now cold, pass along. Brass-hued and opalescent bubbles, com-
pounded of many gases, rise where passing feet have trodden the damper
spots. At night the place is the haunt of the Jack-lantern.

DUMB SHOW

A vast army is encamped here, and in the open spaces are infantry
on parade skeletoned men, some flushed, some shivering, who arc kept
moving because it is dangerous to stay still. Every now and then one
falls down, and is carried away to a hospital with no roof, where he is
laid, bedless, on the ground.

In the distance soldiers are digging graves for the funerals which are
to take place after dark, delayed till then that the sight of so many
may not drive the living melancholy-mad. Faint noises are heard in the

air.

The effect of the whole poem of the choric melo-
dies sung by the spirits, of the prose dumb shows, of the
scenic descriptions, and of the dramatic blank verse
dialogue and soliloquies, creates a scope and movement
which are unique in literature. Its huge sweep generates
a peculiar excitement in the reader an excitement per-

EPIC AND NARRATIVE POETRY 171

haps analogous to that which the old epics lit in their
hearers. For the effect of The Dynasts is not the effect
of Milton or of any other great work of formal beauty
and massivcness. It affects us not only by its plan and its
expression, but by its actual subject matter, by the ac-
tual truth and thrill of the story it tells. The actors are
never more than life size, but the steadiness and solidity
with which we see them, the pervasive unity of the
point of view which directs them, and the immense
width and variety of the scope of the action, create in
themselves an impressiveness which can very well hold
its own with the moral and physical grandeur of the
great epic poems of the past.

DRAMA

U

' NLIKE all other forms of literature, the drama does
not depend upon the written word only for its effects.
Indeed, any drama which attempts to depend on the
written word only is of necessity a poor drama; it has
impoverished itself of its just artistic possessions. For its
full and complete effect a play needs a trinity of cre-
ators author, actors, audience and the total achieve-
ment is an inseparable blend of the -three.

For this reason, the drama is the most popular of the
arts, in the sense that 'the people' are nearer to it than
to any other art. And the great dramatic ages in the
history of the world, the fifth century B.C. and the
Elizabethan age in England, have been those when all
classes of the population have regarded the drama as an
essential part of their common life: when they went to
the theatre as a matter of course and when the fare
presented pleased all sections of the audience, rich and
poor, educated and uneducated. But in any age the suc-
cess of a play depends ultimately upon its immediate
collective response from an audience, and the art of the
playwright is all directed towards, and centered in, the
winning of that. Hence the fullness and sublety of fine
dramatic structure and movement can only be imper-
fectly grasped by reading: they require a stage to call
them into being. Hence, too, the fact that dramatic
technique is entirely different from that of any other
form of writing.

The subject matter of drama is that of all literature
some form of human experience. But the dramatist

DRAMA 173

treats his material in a special way. He does not argue
about it, or discuss it, or analyze it, like the essayist; or
speak of his direct personal emotion about it, like the
lyric poet. He tells a story which illustrates it. But the
epic poet and the novelist also tell stories, and the differ-
ence between them and the dramatist is that the drama-
tist uses a particular kind of presentation for his story.
His whole problem is how to create it, and to convey
everything he wants to say about it, or imply about it,
by means of actors on a stage, in the space of between
two and three hours.

Now the fact that the playwright has to do these
things inevitably involves certain obvious points about
dramatic form. It cannot be leisurely, diffuse or de-
scriptive like the novel, and it cannot include minute
psychological detail. I have been told that there is a cer-
tain stage direction in one of Henry James's plays,
which runs: Enter Mrs. So and So, looking as if she has
just drunk a cup of tea: but we may safely say that no
successful playwright would demand quite such a diffi-
cult feat from any member of his cast! The drama is
solely concerned with effects which can be presented
on the stage with force and precision. Bernard Shaw
says somewhere that ^effectiveness of assertion is the
Alpha and Omega of style,' and this is nowhere more
true than in the theatre. The art of the drama is
the search for methods of communicating assertions
about life effectively on the stage, and the history W
of the theatre is the story of how every original artist
has found ways of doing this which shall embody his
own peculiar vision of his material, and shall yet pro-
duce that spontaneous collective response from an
audience on which drama depends.

i 7 4 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

THE basis of all dramatic technique is the revelation of
character in action. It is impossible to have drama unless
characters are concerned in some form of complication,
and this always involves some clash between individuals,
or between opposing forces of emotions or circum-
stances or ideas. This clash creates the plot of the play.
It may be an opposition between individuals, such as
Othello and lago, or Tanner and Ann Whitcfield in
Man and Superman; or between individual character
and environment or circumstances, as in The Three Sis-
ters or Justice or The Hairy Ape; or between sides of
the character of one human being, as in Macbeth; or
all these opposites may be involved together, as in Ham-
let. There may be a collision of modes of will and pur-
pose, as in Saint Joan, or of mere facts with other facts,
as in The Way of the World, or of facts at war with
ideas and theories, as in The Wild Duck or Strange In-
terlude, or, in a different way, in The Adding Machine .
This sense of clash always brings with it a sense of the
irony of life, which, though not peculiar to drama,
seems to be of its essence. It is impossible to conceive of
any of the complications, tragic or comic, in which
men and women are involved with character or circum-
stance, without this reminder of the innate perversity of
fate and of human nature and human actions; this
discrepancy between reality and men's illusions, the
eternal incongruity of things. It is so tragically ironic
that a man like Hamlet should be called upon to avenge
a murder, and it is so comically ironic that the Irish
peasants in The Playboy of the Western World should
welcome Christy Mahon when they think he has mur-
dered his father, and should think very little of him
when they find that he is innocent. It is so ironic that
Gregers Werle should ruin the happiness of an entire

DRAMA 175

family by believing in telling the truth, and that Mrs.
Alving should be responsible for her son's disease by
denying her own love for Pastor Manders and staying
with her husband, and that Hjalmar EkdaPs egotism,
which is so exquisitely comic to watch and listen to,
should be so very serious in its consequences. It is so
ironic that Antony should kill himself on account of a
message from Cleopatra which is a lie, and that Juliet
should awaken a moment too late: that Othello should
trust lago and distrust Desdemona, and that Lear should
scorn Cordelia and believe her sisters. It is so ironic that
the real Ann Whiteficld should be so different from the
idea of her held by Mr. Ramsden and Tavy Robinson,
and that CEdipus should have killed Laius and married
Jocasta in such pathetic innocence, and that Lydia Lan-
guish should be always craving for a love affair full of
intrigues and jealousy, while poor Julia's life is being
made such a misery by the real jealousy and capricious-
iicss of Faulkner.

The clash of entanglement of action, character or
idea created by the dramatist forms the plot of the play,
and the function of the plot, which is the most impor-
tant element in drama, is to present a structure of situ-
ation in which the characters are caught and tested and
revealed by the circumstances in which they are in-
volved. The characters may, and frequently do, remain
in our memory with extreme vividness as individuals,
but they do so because of the web of events and action
in which the drama has trapped them. It is the course
of events which calls forth the quality of behavior in
them which we call 'character,' and which makes the
essential reality of each individual as he works out his
fate according to the dramatist's plan. Each character
is there as he is, because of the part he has to play in the
piece of action which is the drama, and it is for this rea-
son that the type of criticism which discusses characters

i 7 6 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

in plays as if they were characters in real life is particu-
larly futile. It is the type of Dickens's Mr. Curdle, who
wrote a pamphlet of sixty-four pages on the character
of the Nurse's deceased husband in Romeo and Julie t\
But even the greatest critics do it. When Bradley, for
instance, asks, 'How is it that Othello comes to be the
companion of the one man in the world who is at once
able enough, brave enough and vile enough to ensnare
him?', it is really an absurd question. The answer is
that Shakespeare created lago like that in order to en-
snare Othello, and created Othello so that he should be
ensnared. They are characters in a play, not in real life,
and they are as they are because the playwright saw
them so.

The action of a play, then, is interwoven, warp and
woof, from circumstance and character, by the creative
craftsmanship of the dramatist; and the quality of the
drama, therefore, like that of all other literature, de-
pends ultimately upon the personality behind it. It is
usual to speak of the impersonality of the dramatist,
and it is true that there is no direct relationship between
playwright and audience as there is between essayist,
or novelist, or lyric poet and reader, but neverthe-
less the dramatist's personality is unmistakable in
his work. It is he who chooses the story and determines
the angle from which it is to be presented, and the set-
ing and atmosphere in which it is to develop; it is he
who selects the incidents and plans the emphases dur-
ing its course; above all, it is he who creates the charac-
ters, who directs their speech and their actions, and whc
decides their final destinies. Indeed, we have only to com-
pare and contrast in imagination the different flavors o^
the worlds revealed in the plays, say, of Shakespeare, o
Shaw, and of Galsworthy, to realize at once how the in
dividuality of the dramatist inevitably colors everythinj
he writes. The quality and comprehensiveness of hi

DRAMA 177

world, its kind and scale, will depend on the quality and
comprehensiveness of his own nature. He may create a
small, but very clearly defined atmosphere, such as that of
Tchekov; he may create his values by imposing a certain
point of view on all his material, as Shaw does; he may cre-
ate a world from pure verbal style, as Congreve does; he
may interest himself almost entirely in the relentless reve-
lation of psychological truth, as Ibsen does, or he may
be a great comprehensive spirit like Shakespeare, who
seems to include almost everything, and to be inex-
haustible.

But the dramatist, needless to say, does not set out to
reveal his personality in his plays. Like every other art-
ist, his aim is to give shape and being to certain material
in his mind; to order into outline and to create in lan-
guage a piece of experience. And as we have said, his
problem is how to get his story and its implications
transferred to the minds of an audience, through the me-
dium of stage representation.

There are always two ways in which human experi-
ence can be represented in art: the way of realism and
the way of symbolism. In drama, this means that it can
be presented directly in actual figures of flesh and
blood, or it can be suggested obliquely by the creation
of significant images.

In all great plays the two methods are united. The
nature of Greek drama, with its creation of characters
in the heroic myths and legends into actual figures,
made symbolism inevitable, and to the modern, it is
only through their symbolic significance that many of
the great Greek tragedies can be appreciated today. A
problem such as that of Antigone, for example, in its
realistic aspect, is meaningless to a modern playgoer.
Antigone's brother Polynices has been slain. If she
leaves him unburied, she outrages the laws of her reli-
gion and the dictates of her humanity; if she buries

178 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

him, she disobeys the law of Creon, King of Thebes,
and her punishment is death. Such an actual situation is
inconceivable to us nowadays, and to arrive at the emo-
tional experiences of the play we symbolize the story as
the eternal conflict between the individual conscience
and the power of the state: it becomes the problem of
every political martyr and conscientious objector of all
time.

This expansion of an individual into a type, this sense
of the universal behind the particular and the eternal
behind the temporal is the touchstone of all great dra-
matic creations in all ages. Hamlet is an unfortunate
prince, trapped by the cursed spite of destiny into a
particular situation to which he feels himself quite un-
equal. But he is the symbol of every sensitive spirit
called upon to cope with unwelcome practical prob-
lems. Pastor Manders is a particular narrow, bat-eyed
clergyman, who has plunged a whole family into in-
escapable tragedy by his refusal to face facts, and his
pursuit of a rigid code of outworn convention; but he
stands for all the authority in the world which refuses
to see life as it is, and which continues to rule living
spirits by dead values.

There has been a movement in the modern theatre
called Expressionism, which has aimed at making the
symbolic element dominant in drama. Its exponents try
to universalize their themes by foregoing individualized
names for their characters, and by labelling them The
Man, The Woman, The Nameless One, The Spirit of
the Masses, and so on, and they use symbolic formal
groups to suggest forces such as Labor or Society. It i<
an effort to make an abstract drama on the lines of th<
ideal of abstract form in painting.

The weakness of the form is that its effect is either
as in The Adding Machine, so simple and obvious tha
it reminds one of the crudities of the old morality plays

DRAMA 179

or so elusive as to be unintelligible without interpreta-
tion. Toller's Man and the Masses requires an analyt-
ical program for its comprehension, and Eugene CXNeill,
when he made an expressionistic experiment in The Great
God Brown, found that he had to supply a gloss to ex-
plain 'the mystical pattern which manifests itself as an
overtone . . . dimly behind and beyond the words and
actions of the characters.'

THE symbolism we have been describing thus far has
been symbolism inherent in the whole conception of a
play, but a smaller use of it, its use as an element in
dramatic technique, is one of the most valuable tools in
the dramatist's craft. It is, perhaps, natural that details
of setting and of by-play should play a subtler part in
the drama of today than in that of the past. The nature
of the Greek theatre made the use of such detail impos-
sible. Their symbols had to be large and simple, as, for
example, when, at the end of The Trojan Women, the
reality of war, sung by Homer with so much pomp and
circumstance, is symbolized by Euripides in the lonely
figure of a pitiful old woman, sitting on the ground with
a dead child in her arms. Even the Elizabethan stage,
with its absence of scenery, and open platform, loosed
the bonds of time and place in a way which made the
subtle use of detail an impossibility. Poetic drama never
depends upon it: it has other tools. But in the plays of
Ibsen and Tchekov and of contemporary dramatists,
its emotional suggestion and value is constantly empha-
sized. The footsteps overhead all through the first act of
John Gabriel Borkman, or the presence, outside the
window of the sitting room, of that unseen footbridge
over the mill-race which haunts the whole of Rosmers-
Mm, are instances; while in the last act of The Cherry

180 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

Orchard) the juxtaposition of the real pain of the de-
parture, with the search for Trofimov's goloshes, creates
just that sense of inconsequent frivolity of spirit, side
by side with the validity of genuine emotion, which is
so typical of the whole action. The goloshes, and their
loss at that moment) become a symbol of the whole
character of the comedy, just as in Uncle Vanya the
incident of Uncle Vanya shooting at the Professor, and
missing him, becomes a symbol of the whole character
of the tragedy.

Illustrations from the drama of today are the
number-covered walls of Mr. Zero's house in The Add-
ing Machine) or the puppets who typify the life of
Fifth Avenue in The Hairy Ape y or the two elm trees
in the setting of Desire under the Elms, whose symbol-
ism is explained by O'Neill in the stage directions:

They appear to protect and at the same time subdue.
There is a sinister maternity in their aspect, a crushing
jealous absorption. , . .

The function of symbolism in the technique of a
play is really to economize space. The dramatist may
use it with great artistry to create effects of contrast,
and to enlarge the emotional significance of his speech,
but its greatest value is its power to take the place of
words. For, as we have seen, the main problem of the
playwright is to convey everything for which the nov-
elist can use description, or analysis, or discussion, or
explanation, by the sole means of dialogue.

In this task he has the immense asset (unless he is an
Expressionist!) of direct interpretation through figures
of flesh and blood. His course of events, and the charac-
ters which mould and are moulded by it, are there, be-
fore us. He has no need to describe or explain or analyze
them, they can reveal themselves directly as they are.
But on the other hand, they must reveal themselves,

DRAMA 181

with force and clarity, and without waste of precious
time and space. This means that there must be the mini-
mum of mere action and_eyent which in no way reveals
character; and there must be the minimum of incident
which merely reveals character, without bearing any
vital relation to the plot; and there must be the mini-
mum of the creation of setting and atmosphere for its own
sake only.) Again, whenever the audience feels in a play
that it is being talked at, the dramatist has failed in his
task. When Prospero sits down in the first act of The
Tempest, and tells Miranda the story of his life; or
when Sir Peter Teazle explains the position between
himself and his wife in a soliloquy, the world of dra-
matic illusion is shattered, and it is the dramatist's busi-
ness to keep that illusion intact. It is a world built up
with infinite care out of action and speech and sug-
gestion; the blending of character and event and set-
ting into an organic whole. All are interdependent,
and it is this interdependence, this organic unity, which
is the genius of drama. The scope of its achievement is
the measure of the dramatist's success, for the more
passion, movement and thought he can compress into
his narrow limits, the greater dramatist he will be.
Behind all dramatic technique is the effort to make
these narrow limits as wide as they can possibly be. The
great example of brilliance in accomplishing this in the
modern world is Ibsen. Ibsen always begins his stories
immediately before some crisis in the lives of his char-
acters, and he manages to widen the reach of the
'dramatic present* to include all the physical and emo-
tional events of the past which are relevant to this
opening situation. The dramatic illusion is never broken,
but the dialogue not only distils the essence of the
situation and the characters which are before us, but
also gradually evokes everything which has made these
people what they are, and their story what it is. So

182 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

that soon the unseen past is incarnated in the imagination
of the audience as vividly as the dramatic present, and
becomes a living part of the movement of the actual
things seen. This fusion of the inner and outward drama,
the present and past, is achieved with a matchless com-
pression and economy of means, and there is no other
dramatist who is Ibsen's equal in creating organic
structure. We can see the principle at work in the
smallest detail of his plotting, and a very good example
is given by C. K. Munro in his Watching a Play. He
points out that at the opening of the third act of The
Wild Ducky Ibsen makes Gina give a description of
Gregers Werle's stupidity about the stove in his room:
how he first forgot to open the register and hence
filled the room with smoke, and then drenched it with
water trying to put the fire out. The description of the
incident provides some good comedy, and is also re-
vealing of the general mental obtuseness of Gregers,
which is the mainspring of the whole tragedy. But it
plays yet another part in the general dramatic structure;
for later in the act, Gregers has to have a private con-
versation with his father on the stage, and without the
accident to his* room there would be no possible reason
for their not going there to have it. So that one little
incident provides variety in the dramatic atmosphere,
interprets character, and contributes a necessary detail
of the mechanism of the stage.

An interesting modern experiment in technique is
that of O'Neill in Strange Interlude. The soliloquy and
the aside were early methods of revealing personality
outside the limits of the dialogue, but O'Neill has
revived and expanded them in a new and original way
in this play. Here the drama of the characters' thoughts
accompanies the drama of their speech and actions,
so that we listen to both throughout the course of the
play. There is no doubt that at the beginning, before

DRAMA 183

the characters are firmly planted in our imaginations,
the device gives a great sense of added richness to the
dialogue; and throughout there is an enhanced sense
of the psychological cross-currents under the surface of
all human relationships. But it is doubtful if O'Neill
reveals anything about his characters which an Ibsen
could not have conveyed in other and more economical
ways, and the interest of the audience in them is ex-
hausted before the end of the nine acts which are re-
quired to tell their story.

The strongest effect which is gained, however, though
it is worked overtime, is stroke after stroke of that
particular kind of ironic comment which is known as
t dran^ti_irony' that device by which the audience
is made aware of things about the characters and
actions on the stage, of which the characters them-
selves are ignorant. And this device is so powerful be-
cause it is bound up with that essential element in
dramatic art the participation of the audience in it.
It is above all the quality in stage circumstance which
links the audience to the dramatic situation. By it they
become, as it were, superior to the action of the play;
they know more than the characters on the stage; they
are in the confidence of the dramatist himselfj

It is obvious that O'Neill's experiment allows qf a
very lavish use of this effect, but it is an effect which
has always been one of the most telling in the craft of
the playwright. The most famous and powerful of all
examples of this is in Macbeth. 'A little water clears us
of this deed,' says Lady Macbeth at the end of the
murder scene (in itself a grim ironic stroke for those
who know what is coming), and then follows the scene
where the porter, utterly oblivious of what has hap-
pened, grumbles and jests, and likens himself, all un-
conscious of the grim truth of his remarks, to the porter
of hell-gate. Another example of a similar use of irony

i8 4 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

is the scene in the Electra of Sophocles, when Aegisthus,
thinking to find the slain body of his enemy Orestes,
opens the doors of the palace, and after a quibbling
dialogue with Electra, where every sentence she speaks
bears one meaning to the audience and another to the
ignorant ^Egisthus discovers that the body he thinks
is Orestes' is that of his paramour Clytemnestra.

Dramatic irony is even more telling in comedy than
in tragedy. Indeed, it is impossible to conceive of comedy
without it. If we start thinking of the most famous
scenes in comedy, we find that they almost always
depend on the audience being in a secret which a char-
acter on the stage does not share: on the fact that
Portia and Rosalind are women, or that the highway-
men on Gadshill are the Prince and Poins, or that
Volpone is well and vigorous, or that it is Lady Teazle
behind the screen. When Jack Worthing, in The Impor-
tance of Being Earnest) enters in ultra deep mourning
and announces the death of his imaginary younger
brother, it is the audience's knowledge, and his igno-
rance, that his friend Algernon has just been imperson-
ating this same young brother to his ward, that makes
the situation so exquisitely comic, just as it does in The
School for Scandal, when Charles Surface discusses the
chances of his uncle's death with the supposed money-
lender, who is really his uncle himself. The whole of
The Rivals (which, on the score of effectiveness in the
theatre, plays The School for Scandal off the stage)
is a succession of situations springing from the ironical
effect of mistaken identity and cross purposes.

But it is time to say something more explicit of the
nature of Tragedy and Comedy, and of whether clear
definitions of either of them are possible.

DRAMA 185

HORACE WALPOLE said that life is a comedy to those
who think and a tragedy to those who feel, and it is
tempting to make the real distinction the fact that
tragedy appeals to the emotions and comedy to the
intellect.

This is the basis of Meredith's famous essay on
Comedy. He defined it as 'thoughtful laughter/ and
regards it as the standard of common sense applied to
life's experiences. Its victims are everything which
clashes with the norm of pure sanity anything exag-
gerated or disproportioned, pretentious or pedantic. It
has a vast detached and scientific knowledge of human
weaknesses, and of the all-pervading, insidious and
ineradicable presence of human self-deception. Its
natural prey is human folly 'known to it in all its
transformations, in every disguise; and it is with the
springing delight of hawk over heron, hound after fox,
that it gives her chase.*

Hence intellectual comedy is almost invariably satiric.
Even a play like The Rivals, though it is all pure fun,
has an undertone of satire in its laughter at Lydia's
capriciousness and Faulkner's jealousy, at Mrs. Mal-
aprop's pretensions and Sir Anthony's tyranny. There
is an element of exposure in it: it has no pity for its
victims. We can see it very clearly in The School for
Scandal, which is written in a much more serious vein
than The Rivals, and in The Way of the World, where
its medium is the extreme of witty verbal dexterity,
and its satire none the less searching for being so cynical
and suave. The plays of Bernard Shaw are the best con-
temporary illustration of this type of comedy. By the
application of good-humored but deadly, intellectual
logic to the whole of modern society, he has forced it
to recognize and to laugh at the shams of political

i86 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

jobbery, the nonsense of romantic love, the quackery
of the medical profession, the hypocrisies of history and
the stupidities of war.

But when we have said all we can about the comedy
which deals with the discomfiture of human rogues and
fools, we find that we cannot possibly pretend that it
includes the whole of comedy, or that we can differ-
entiate neatly between comedy and tragedy by saying
that comedy deals with the intellect and tragedy with
the emotions. Many of the best comedies of manners
The School for Scandal is an obvious example are a
blending of intellectual and emotional elements, ancj
when we turn to the comedies of Shakespeare, it is clear
that the generalization completely breaks down.

Shakespeare never delighted to 'expose' anything or
anybody. He never seems critical of * any single idea
or ethical standard or custom of his time. The hardness
of heart towards knaves and fools, which is an essential
of the true comedian of manners, seems unknown to
him. Compare the portait of Sir Andrew Aguecheek,
for example, with that of Tattle in Congreve's Love
for Love. Shakespeare never works in that hard dry
light in which the figures of intellectual comedy live and
move. When he creates a character which embodies the
standard of pure sanity, it is Touchstone, who combines
all his laughter at hypocrisy and folly with the most
touching loyalty to the two girls, and who even goes
so far as to marry the most simple and foolish of country
wenches. A hero such as Mirabell in The Way of the
World is inconceivable in Shakespeare. A_any_ moment
in a Shakespearean comedy we may be nearer tears than
laughter. Even Doll Tearsheet brings a lump to the
throat as she bids Falstaff goodbye: 'Come, I'll be
friends with thee, Jack: thou art going to the wars; and
whether I shall ever see thee again or no, there is no-
body cares.'

DRAMA 187

As Hazlitt said, Shakespeare's ridicule 'wants the
sting of ill-nature . . . his comic muse is too good-
natured and magnanimous.' Instead of concentrating
his genius on victimizing folly and self-deception,
stupidity and greed, his comedies almost all deal with
the restoration to happiness of innocent victims of in-
justice and misfortune of one sort or another. His wit
lacks malice and his mockery has no bite.

Comedy is always remarkable for creating worlds
which are subject to no laws but their own, and where
behavior cannot be measured by the standards of real
life. The worlds of Volpone, of The Way of the World
or of A Kiss for Cinderella are cases in point, and
Skakespeare's comedies are the extreme instance. It is the
atmosphere and the mood in which they are created
which are their charm. They are full of the utmost
absurdities of situation, they are huddled up anyhow
to a happy ending for all, and their dialogue is often
dull and often tasteless and often shoddy. All standards
of realism are completely abandoned. Pepys described
A Midsummer Night's Dream as c the most insipid,
ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life/ and if purely
rational values are applied to romantic comedy that is
what it inevitably appears. It is full of the grossest
outrages on common sense. In the same way we have got
to accept that neither Orlando nor her father recognize
Rosalind in her boy's dress; that Imogen can be happy
with a contemptible cur like Posthumous, or Helena with
one like Bertram; that anyone for a moment could be-
lieve the ridiculous slander on Hero, and so on. . . . Yet
once we have achieved that willing suspension of dis-
belief which constitutes poetic faith, and have entered
and accepted this world of illusion, it is far richer
humanly than the world of any writer of realistic
comedy. It is full of the assurance that jdl's jraye -that
Youth mounts and Folly guides'; full of all the charm

188 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

and spirit together with a keen appreciation of the
absurdities of young love; full of a feeling for every-
thing graceful and sweet and gay in humanity and
nature; full of a warm delight in oddities of character
of all sorts and sizes, and in every class and calling; and
full of a rich sense of fun and whole-hearted fooling of
every imaginable kind. And finally in his last comedies,
the romances, Shakespeare allowed real human evil and
suffering to enter this world. The jealousy of Leontes,
the disloyalty of Posthumous, the really cruel pain of
Hermione and Imogen are quite different from the
misfortunes and misdoings of the earlier plays, but yet
this evil and suffering are subdued and reconciled to
the conclusions of comedy.

So the statement that the distinction between Tragedy
and Comedy is that between the appeal to the emotions
and the appeal to the intellect cannot stand at all. And
if we try to make the division as between plays which
end with the death of the principal character and those
which do not, we are forced to class Uncle Vanya and
The Three Sisters and Justice and The Silver Box as
comedies, and The Doctor's Dilemma as a tragedy.
While if we are driven to say it is simply a distinction
between stories of human happiness and unhappiness,
we must say that Romeo and Juliet is a story of human
unhappiness, and that Volpone is a story of human
happiness, either of which is absurd.

AND yet everyone probably agrees that there is some
similarity which links plays as superficially unlike one
another as Othello and The Three Sisters and Ghosts and
Justice, and another similarity which links plays as
unlike as As You Like It and Volpone and The Country
Wife and Man and Superman.

DRAMA 189

The similarity can obviously have nothing to do
with the actual subject matter of the plays. A jealous
husband is the basis of tragedy in Of hello and of comedy
in The Country Wife; Cleopatra is a figure in a tragedy
to Shakespeare and in a comedy to Shaw. Nor can the
likeness be in the personalities behind the plays, nor in
their technical use of their medium, for there is noth-
ing in common between them in these matters. It must,
therefore, be something to do with the effect they
create in the audience or reader, and so we are led to
examine more closely what that effect is.

And here we do find a distinction which has, I think,
some validity. The essence of comedy is found to lie in
one kind of emotional response, and the essence of
tragedy in another kind of emotional response. The
different effects, that is, are psychological effects. We do
not know enough about the human consciousness to
say by what psychological workings these results are
reached, nor is it of any consequence that we should.
It is not the business of literary criticism to understand
psychological causes, but to note their effects, to dis-
criminate between them, and to question how they are
produced by the means of literary art.

The variety in the emotional solutions of dramatic
problems which is the great distinguishing feature of
the experiences of tragedy and comedy is not, as we have
seen, simply the distinction between happiness and
unhappiness the terror by night and the joy which
cometh in the morning. It is rooted in something more
complex: that is, in the emotional values which pre-
vail at the end of a play. Comedy is concerned with
temporal values: tragedy with eternal. Comedy deals
with the relationship of individuals to society, and of
society to individuals, and its final standards are always
social. Even in Man and Superman, where the superb
first act shows Tanner, with matchless wit and dexterity,

i 9 o ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

making mincemeat of the shams and inconsistencies of
the conventional social creed, the end of the play finds
him, for all his intellectual honesty, a victim to the life-
force which drags him back into the general social
pattern of behavior. We see the same thing in The Way
of the World. Its satire on the world of sex-relationship
is, by its implications, as savage and cynical as it well
could be: but the end sees Millamant and Mirabell set-
ting out optimistically on the lines laid down by common
social law. The conclusions of comedy imply the terms
on which ordinary life has got to be lived: it is not
concerned with abstract justice but with the judgment
of this world, emotional and ethical. It acquiesces quite
happily in the death of Louis Dubedat in The Doctor's
Dilemma, for Shaw makes us feel unmistakably that
the gain to society in his death is greater than the loss
to art, and the audience is perfectly content to allow the
dramatic value of the episode to be that of satiric
comedy on the incompetence of doctors. But the judg-
ments of comedy can be very cruel, as we can see in the
matter of the rejection of Falstaflf. That episode, quite
revolting to the sympathetic individual, is essential if
the social norm is to be upheld. Henry V has the whole
weight of society behind his priggish self-complacency,
and by its inexorable standards Falstaff is a besotted and
disgusting and dishonest old wretch who must drop out
of the story of a hero-king.

And as with its ethical so with the emotional stand-
ards of comedy: the response to it is associated with
a sense of pleasant release from tension, a satisfying
solution of emotional stress, an escaping from misfortune
into peace. It is because of this that comedy is always
associated with laughter. Laughter is essentially a social
thing, and the psychologists tell us it always has a sense
of release behind it. In comedy it finds a channel of

DRAMA 191

expression which it cannot have in actual life, for in
art actions and qualities can become laughable by being
isolated from the inevitable results which would ac-
company them in real life, and can therefore be en-
joyed with a liberty which life forbids. Falstaff's fatness
and drunkenness and senile lechery, as well as his habit
of lying and swindling and his care for his own skin,
would actually have such unpleasant physical and moral
consequences that there would really be nothing funny
about them. But in the theatre we are released from the
bonds of actuality, and can find a primitive pleasure
in identifying ourselves with Falstaff's own freedom
from the sense of bodily tyranny, and the importance of
moral standards, thus releasing ourselves for a short time
from their habitual despotism.

But laughter is not by any means essential to comedy.
We can have the sense of a satisfying solution without
laughter, and indeed the conclusion of a fine comedy
seldom finds us laughing. It may find us in all sorts
of moods, for a comedy is a pattern of a personality, and
there arc therefore as many different comedy flavors
as there are personalities who write them, but whether
its effect is as simple as You Never Can Tell or as com-
plex as The Tempest, it will always leave us with a
sense of relaxation and contentment in our emotional
and intellectual response. There is, presumably, a strong
element of wish-fulfillment in our attitude. If we are
ourselves rational and sympathetic, we like to see the
discomfiture of fools and knaves, and a happy ending to
the troubles of the pleasant and the deserving. The
conclusion seems to satisfy our consciousness of com-
munal good sense and good feeling: it leaves us with a
coherent and stable attitude to life: in it life is made to
appear intelligible and finite.

If it does not leave us in this mood; if it has stirred

192 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

emotions and has not harmonized them into a satisfying
final chord, it has failed as comedy. The Merchant of
Venice, for example, fails in this way to a modern
audience, because of our attitude to Shylock. So does
Much Ado About: Nothing because of the too poignant
suffering of Hero: it is revolting to us that she should
marry Claudio after the way he has insulted her. So
does Measure for Measure because the emotional dis-
tress of the characters has been too serious for the
light-hearted match-making of the conclusion. We are
left rebellious, we do not acquiesce in the final judg-
ments: they jar on our sense of what is just and fitting.
There is something in the response which forbids that
kind of emotional solution.

THAT something is the element of tragedy, which has
not been subdued, as Shakespeare subdued it in his later
'romances/ to the conclusions of comedy, and which
remains, therefore, an unassimilated element. The
scheme of temporal values will not fit the facts. And this
is the great difference between tragedy and comedy
that in tragedy we are forced to throw overboard the
attitude by which we can find life intelligible. We have
got to accept it as it is, and to find a harmony, if a har-
mony can be found, in the discovery of values other than
those of this world.

It is, perhaps, bjppause the full enjoyment of great
tragedy is felt by all lovers of literature to be the most
comprehensive and the most intense of all their liter-
ary experiences, that so much has been written about
tragedy, and that the subject is so riddled with critical
theory. We cannot escape from Aristotle, though he
himself might well have agreed with Dryden, who re-
marked with admirable good sense:

DRAMA 193

It is not enough that Aristotle has said so, for
Aristotle drew his models of tragedy from Sophocles
and Euripides, and if he had seen ours might have
changed his mind.

Aristotle declared that the 'tragic emotions' are pity
and terror; that a tragedy must not be the spectacle
of a perfectly good man brought from prosperity to
adversity, for that merely shocks us; and that the only
proper subject for tragedy is the spectacle of a man, not
absolutely or eminently good or wise, who is brought
to disaster not by sheer depravity, but by some error
or frailty.

But if we test these statements upon our own expe-
riences in seeing plays, we find ourselves at once question-
ing whether they really hold good. Is it true that we feel
pity and terror more than any other emotions when
we see a tragedy? And why should horror or gloom or
indignation or rebellion not be 'tragic emotions'? Do
we not most certainly feel such emotions even in the
greatest tragedies? When Macduff comes in calling out
'O horror, horror, horror!', are we not intended to have
the same feeling? Do we not justly feel the warmest
indignation in Othello or Antigone, the bitterest sense
of rebellion in The Trojan Women, the profoundest
gloom in Ghost st And certainly none of the expla-
nations which have been given of Aristotle's 'catharsis'
the purging by pity and terror seem to square at all
with the response of the average play-goer. Does it
merely shock us to see the spectacle ^F a wholly innocent
victim? Surely the generations of persons, whether
Christians or not, who have been profoundly moved at
the drama at Oberammergau, disprove it. But even in
secular drama, The Trojan Women and Antigone and
Romeo and Juliet and The Duchess of Malfi and Shaw's
Saint Joan are pertinent illustrations.

If we ignore theory in our approach to tragedy, and

i 9 4 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

judge only by our direct experience of actual drama,
we find that there is only one thing which is common
to every tragedy, and that is the presentation, in terms
of dramatic art, of some aspect of human suffering.
The tragic dramatist sees mankind, as every sensitive
and observant person must see mankind, compassed
about with mystery and misfortune, conquered by fate,
the sport of glands or coincidence, at the mercy of
character or environment, the perpetual victim of
cruelty and injustice and pain. He sees this, perhaps,
symbolized in a great traditional myth, peopled with
gods and heroes of how Agamemnon sacrificed Iphi-
genia to a cruel superstition, and how her mother Cly-
temnestra revenged her death by murdering her hus-
band, and how her son CEdipus revenged his father by
murdering his mother and her lover, and how the gods
revenged themselves on him. Or he may see it in the
story of an old man following a silly whim of dividing
up his kingdom according to the love for him professed
by his daughters; or. in the story of a man and wife
planning a murder for ambition, and how their natures
prevented them from being successful criminals. Or he
may see it in famous figures of history, such as An-
tony and Cleopatra or Joan of Arc; or in the story of
how social injustice brought a kind, honest charwoman
to ruin and despair. Or he may see it in a group of very
futile, but very pitiful people, suffering chiefly from
the results of their own low vitality; or he may see how
the character of a neurotic, unprincipled woman might
poison her own life and those of other and better folk.
The spectacle of this human suffering, in whatever
form, will inevitably provoke that awareness of the
irony of human life which we have already described as
the essential of dramatic art; and it is the manner in
which the chief character, the 'tragic hero,' is involved

DRAMA 19 j

in the ironical situation, which has most to do with the
ultimate emotional effect of the play.

Now although it seems quite illogical and untrue to
declare that the sufferings of an innocent victim of
circumstances are not tragic, it is true that they are
not as dramatically stimulating as the subtler forms of
irony. The charwoman in The Silver Box, or the
Duchess of Malfi, or Iphigenia, are not great tragic
heroines: they are pitiful figures, crying out with
Romeo, C O, I am Fortune's fool/ All the very greatest
figures of tragedy are, as Aristotle said, not absolutely
good or wise, and are brought to disaster by some error
or frailty. Lear cries out too, 'I am even the natural fool
of Fortune/ but beside it we remember Goneril's com-
ment, 'Tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath ever but
slenderly known himself/ And so it is with each of the
heroes of the greatest tragedy: the net of disaster in
which he becomes ensnared, and finally perishes, is
woven in part by himself, however innocently he may
have done it.

It used to be a favorite examination question to quote
the saying c Character is Destiny/ and to require the
candidates to discuss it in regard to the tragedies of
Shakespeare. And indeed it is an interesting question
in regard to tragedies in general. Ibsen is, of course, the
great example of its application. Relentless psycholog-
ical truth plays the same part in Ibsen's dramas as the
Nemesis of the Greeks: one feels that the plot is con-
structed with the minutest care to bear out the whole
remorseless interplay of psychological cause and effect in
human destiny. O'Neill attempts, but I think fails, to
create a similar effect in Mourning Becomes Electra. With
Shakespeare, the irony of circumstance, that is, sheer bad
luck, always has a hand in the action. No element of
character enters into the fact that Hamlet stabbed

i 9 6 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

Polonius and not the King behind the arras, or that
Desdemona dropped her handkerchief at so ill-starred
a moment, or that the message of reprieve for Cordelia
reached the prison too late.

But in spite of these unlucky incidents, we do feel
that, consciously or unconsciously, the seeds of the trag-
edy lie in the personality of the chief character. The de-
gree to which he is responsible for his own ruin varies in
different plays. Obviously Macbeth is more responsible
than Hamlet, Antony than Brutus, Lear than Saint
Joan, Rebecca West than Mrs. Alving. The degree of
moral guilt involved also varies enormously. Orestes and
Macbeth are both murderers, yet Orestes is only a mur-
derer in the sense that Hamlet is one: he had to avenge
his father. Antigone and Brutus also^act from the high-
est conviction of duty: Othello did naught in hate but
all in honor: Lear made a hasty judgment and let his
temper run away with him. In fact, the 'tragic error' is
far more often a mistake, some false step taken blindly,
than a deliberate offence, or even a symptom of some-
thing 'false within.'

And it is for this reason that although it is a charac-
teristic of fine tragic irony that the hero should in some
sense be the author of his own undoing, we seldom have
any sense of justice at the end of a great tragedy. We do
have that sense, of course, where the hero is a great
criminal. The death of Macbeth is the only possible ex-
piation for his life, and there is something of the same
feeling about the deaths of Brutus and of Antony and
Cleopatra. But it is unusual to have any conclusion so
comforting to our ethical instincts. Comedy, as we have
said, does find some solution for human problems, some
harmony between individual and social values, but
tragedy ignores any such reconciliation. In tragedy we
have got to accept that disaster may fall upon people
equally whether they mean well or ill: that Hamlet and

DRAMA 197

Othello, who are so noble and honest, come to the same
end as lago and Edmund who are evil through and
through: that Desdemona and Cordelia and Ophelia are
sacrificed and butchered: that in death Hedda Gabler
and Hedwig Ekdal are equal. Any sense of harmony
we may win from these facts can certainly have no
relation to temporal or social values.

And it is idle to pretend that any sense of emotional
harmony can be found in a great number of tragic
plays. There is no doubt that the performance of any
good serious play does produce a deep sense of enjoy-
ment, but I believe that to be the enjoyment of the
play as a work of art the effect on the consciousness
of the growth and completion of an artistic unity.
It is the result of that welding power with which
the great dramatist creates the sense of unity, rich-
ness and depth in the dramatic conflict. At the con-
clusion of a fine play we have the sense of a complete,
satisfying and enriching experience. The wheel has
come full circle, the end is linked inevitably with the
beginning, and the result of that triumphant creation
of what we call Form has produced those peculiar feel-
ings of assurance and serenity with which we leave the
theatre all that satisfaction of the emotional and in-
tellectual nature which we imply when we say with
heartfelt enthusiasm, 'That really is the goods!' Plays
such as The Three Sisters, or The Wild Duck, or Justice,
or The Trojan Women, bring this pleasure the deep
satisfaction of deeply felt and well executed works of
art. But humanly speaking they remain painful in the
extreme, and it is significant that people who are not
sensitive to drama as art never find any enjoyment in
such plays, and are merely depressed by them. The piti-
ful death of poor little Hedwig, the incurable heartache
of the three sisters, the desolating injustice of Justice
can obviously produce nothing, if we regard them

i 9 8 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

simply as a picture of life, except indignant rebellion
against, or mournful acceptance of, the helplessness of
man and the cruelties of destiny. ^

But that there is a sense of emotional harmony at the
conclusion of some tragedies is attested by universal ex-
perience. This may be achieved by the conviction that
the death of the hero is the real crown to his tragic
story. Milton echoes the feeling of every reader when
he sings of Samson's triumph:

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise or blame, nothing but well and fair
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.

Or it may be that we feel death to, be far kinder than
any possible life, as we do at the end of King Lear.

O, let him pass! He hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.

These impressions are quite comprehensible; but it
is less easy to account for the sense of exaltation which
is undoubtedly in our hearts at the conclusion of Hamlet
or Othello. There are Ophelia and Desdemona dead, the
most innocent of helpless victims, and the heroes them-
selves have really been very near helpless victims too.
'The readiness is all/ says Hamlet as he contemplates
his own death, but that is not the feeling of the spec-
tators about Hamlet. It is rather a passion of protest that
anyone so lovable, so unusual, so full of intellectual and
emotional sensitiveness and vigor, should be wasted and
sacrificed in a struggle with a creature such as the King.
Othello has done more to forfeit the full sympathy of
the audience before his death, but the vision of him in
all his noble courage and simplicity returns in full force
at the end, and we have the same passion of protest that

DRAMA 199

the base and vile lago should have had the power to
devastate his grandeur.

Yet in spite of this sense of cruel injustice, this baf-
fled eternal cry of humanity, 'God of our Fathers, what
is Man? 5 , the final impression is undoubtedly the affir-
mation of some higher values than those of mere tem-
poral justice. We never watch the struggles of the great
tragic hero as the struggles of the worm on the hook. I
think it is Bradley who points out that though we speak
of the depths of despair or sorrow or suffering, we al-
ways speak of the heights of tragedy, and of character
and events being lifted on to the tragic plane. And
there is great significance in that common use of words.
Though the facts of the story may seem to prove the
exact opposite, the conviction alive in us at the end of
Hamlet or Othello is that somehow nobility and loyalty
and honesty and innocence and courage are the ulti-
mate values: that they are imperishable and absolute,
and that though man be wretched and misguided and
unlucky, he is not mean or contemptible or small.

IT is not because Shakespeare's vision of life is any
different from that of any other tragic dramatist that
his plays create this impression. He saw the great cen-
tral tragic fact as not only every dramatist, but every
thinking and feeling man and woman sees it the cen-
tral tragic irony that the interweaving of fate and cir-
cumstance and character enmesh everyone alike, the
finest as well as the foulest, the noblest as well as the
vile. But the secret of Shakespeare's greatness is that he
has interpreted the tragic irony of life in dramatic
poetry of a fire and richness and range far beyond that
of anyone else.

In drama the audience have to be transported by the

200 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

spoken word 9 out of their own world into the world of
the play. On the character of the dialogue, therefore,
everything depends. It is what we call 'style' which
creates the character of the world into which the artist
transports us. It is an artificial world in the nature of
things, since it is art, not life, we are watching. But we
are aware of quite different experiences as we watch
different plays. We may feel that we are being deliber-
ately isolated from our ordinary experience, and trans-
ported to an experience which is deliberately limited
or distorted by the artist for his own purposes. These,
I think, are our feelings about the plays of Ben Jon-
son, or Congreve or the minor Elizabethans or the
early poetic dramas of W. B. Yeats. Or again, we may
feel that the world we enter in a play is the world with
which we are familiar, sharpened and intensified and
reshaped by the vision of the dramatist. These are our
feelings about Sheridan or Shaw or Ibsen or Galsworthy.
Or again we may feel that we are at one and the same
time partaking of the familiar and of the unfamiliar,
and that though the world to which we have been
transported is a purely artificial world, and is in some
ways a limitation or a distortion of our own world, that
in its most important aspect it is a world where familiar
figures and familiar emotions are transformed by a pe-
culiar change in size and pitch and tone into something
of unique rarity and value. And this is the world of
Shakespeare and of all great dramatic poetry.

It is a world where the use of words is all-important:
where the whole tone and coloring and significance of
a play may be suggested by the use of certain images
and symbols in it; where character can be hinted in the
turn of a line, or in the rhythm of a repetition; where
sheer music bears a huge emotional weight. Prose can-
not enter this world.

When Faustus cries:

DRAMA 201

O thou art fairer than the evening star
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

or Isabella in The White Devil cries:

You have oft, for these two lips,
Neglected cassia or the natural sweets
Of the spring violet: they are not yet much withered.

or Antony cries:

I am dying, Egypt, dying; only
I here importune death awhile until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips.

we are at once in the midst of a completely different
experience from that of any prose dialogue.

It is a question for the psychologist or the neurolo-
gist to determine why it is that the mere rythm of verse
has a special emotional effect on the human organism.
But it is enough for the reader of literature to know
that it is so. The pitch is somehow at once raised.

Lear. But goes thy heart with this?

Cordelia. Ay, good my lord.

Lear. So young and so un tender?

Cordelia. So young, my lord, and true.

Cleopatra. He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not
Be noble to myself: but hark thee, Charmian.

Iras. Finish, good lady; the bright day is done,

And we are for the dark.

There is a magic in this which no prose can touch,
and yet there is no loss at all in the dramatic value of
the language.

Not, however, that the verse of poetic drama is al-
ways strictly dramatic. Even in the short extracts quoted
here, there is a distinction of accent which is significant.
When Marlowe writes:

202 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

O thou art fairer than the evening star . . .
and when Antony says:

I am dying, Egypt, dying . . .

we feel one to be the line of a poet who is writing
drama, and the other of a dramatist who is writing po-
etry. There is always this struggle, as it were, going on
in poetic plays, and the plays of Shakespeare are full
of speeches which, while they may move us and stir us,
and bewitch our ears, are in essence lyrical and not
dramatic; that is, they are concerned with creating
emotion directly in the audience, rather than with re-
vealing character in action. We have only to compare,
for instance, the whole tone of Romeo and Juliet with
that of Antony and Cleopatra to see the broad meaning
of this; but even when Shakespeare has perfected his
verse as a dramatic instrument, he quite often deliber-
ately uses the lyrical stop to gain some of his peculiar
effects.

It is this which vitiates a great deal of the criticism
which claims minute psychological truth in Shake-
speare's delineation of character. Shakespeare did not
value minute psychological truth as, for example, Ibsen
did. We do not know by what processes his characters
have become what they are: his method is that of reve-
lation, not analysis. His chief aim, to which he bent his
whole genius, was immediate 'effectiveness of assertion/
that is, the immediate response of the audience to what
is being said, whether it is strictly 'dramatic* or not.
For instance, when Antony dies and Cleopatra says:

The crown o* the earth doth melt. My lord!
O, withered is the garland of the war,
The soldier's pole is fall'n: young boys and girls
Are level now with men; the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.

DRAMA 203

it is pure verbal magic which bespells us: a kind of
rhythmic and splendid oratory. The effect is the same
when Othello, convinced by lago of Desdemona's faith-
lessness, bursts out:

O, now for ever

Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell,
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner and all quality,
Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war!

It is not really dramatically relevant to the moment at
all, but we do not consider that, we are simply carried
along by the rhetoric.

The whole play of Othello is, indeed, a very good
illustration of Shakespeare's carelessness about logical
consistency of character, of his belief or more prob-
ably his natural dramatic instinct that the essential of
a play is that it should live vividly from moment to
moment, that the audience should be swept along and
transported out of the realms of mere common sense. It
is questionable, I think, whether even Shakespeare's gen-
ius does accomplish what he set out to do in Othello,
but in it he certainly strained all his immense powers
as an artist to create a series of scenes of dramatic
poetry which should make the audience forget the com-
plete lack of consistency of character or adequate moti-
vation of plot in the play. For it is logically impossible
that the Othello of the first act, with his matchless dig-
nity and proud reserve, should become the hideous
foaming creature who falls so pitifully easily to lago's
foul insinuations. Similarly it is useless to try to dis-
cover lago's real motives for trying to bring Othello to
ruin. In spite of his soliloquies, he never convinces us in

204 EN JOYMENT OF LITERATURE

the least of any real reason. He represents, as Coleridge
said, 'motiveless malignity.' In the same way, we must
accept that Desdemona would be such a tactless little
ninny as to go on talking about Cassio so persistently
when it so clearly annoys her husband; and that Emilia
could possibly be as thick-headed about lago as she
has to be. Shakespeare determined that we should not
think of these things while we are in the theatre: that
we should be whirled along by the emotional current in
such an intensity of poetic and dramatic experience
that nothing else should matter; that the volume and
surge of passion, the heart-breaking pathos, and the sheer
music and thunder of words, should deafen us to logic.
Othello is a magnificent theatrical tour dc force, but
Shakespeare is a still finer artist when he shows himself
a great creator of solid and consistent ^character, as well
as a great poet and a great master of theatre-craft.
In Macbeth, for instance, the poetry of his part is
throughout the revelation of his personality. It is of
the essence of his character that he should speak in
poetry highly charged with a vivid quality of vision.
It is the root of the whole conception of him that he
not only sees a dagger in the air and the ghost of
Banquo at the feast, but that he no sooner thinks of
any action he is going to do, or has done, than his
imagination immediately floods his consciousness with
pictures and images which illustrate its emotional color-
ing. When he starts thinking of Duncan's goodness,
at once he sees his virtues pleading

like angels trumpet-tongued against
The deep damnation of his taking off ;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.

DRAMA 205

His mind swarms with horrible suggestions as he waits
for the bell which is the signal for the murder.

Now o'er the one half-world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings; and wither'd murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost.

And as he looks at his bloody hand, he sees it reddening
all the water in the universe.

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Lady Macbeth knows that she must at all costs keep this
faculty in him in check if they are to win success. She
cuts him short with ruthless practical suggestions and
commands.

Lady M. These deeds must not be thought

After these ways; so, it will make us mad.

Macbeth. Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more!

Macbeth does murder sleep' the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd slcave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast,

Lady M. What do you mean?

Macbeth. Still it cried 'Sleep no more!' to all the house:

'Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more: Macbeth shall sleep no more.'

Lady M. Who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy thane,
You do unbend your noble strength, to think
So brainsickly of things. Go get some water,
And wash this filthy witness from your hand.

206 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

And the dullness, dramatically, of the fifth act of
Macbeth, is because the degeneration of Macbeth is
symbolized by his loss of this intense quality of sensi-
bility.

I have almost forgot the taste of fears:

The time has been, my senses would have cooPd

To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair

Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir

As life were in't: I have supp'd full with horrors;

Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,

Cannot once start me.

There is only 'sound and fury, signifying nothing*
left in him; and in the play, too.

IN both Othello and Macbeth we feel very strongly
one of the clearest qualities in great poetic drama
the towering size of the central characters. The poetry
which comes from the mouths of these men is so
vital and kindling; it throws such an atmosphere of
emotional richness and intensity about them, they live
so far more widely and deeply and greatly than common
humanity, that they seem far beyond life size. This
effect is still more noticeable in King Lear, and it is the
measure of Shakespeare's genius as a dramatic poet that
he could create this effect when he had chosen as his
hero a man who had nothing inherently great in him at
all. Macbeth and Othello come upon the stage as great
soldiers who were already heroes in their own right,
but there is nothing heroic about Lear. Apart from the
accident of his kingship, he is a stupid, vain, tiresome
old man: that is all. But Shakespeare's poetry builds up
a sense of suffering so overwhelming in its hugeness

DRAMA 207

that his dimensions appear titanic. Gradually, by al-
most imperceptible modulations, he heightens the pitch
of the human emotion until in the storm scenes it is
fused with all the elemental forces of nature into the
sublimity of wild and blinding pain. And following
that supreme achievement in the symbolism of agony,
Shakespeare created his supreme achievement in pure
human pity and tenderness, the meeting of Lear and
Cordelia.

Cor. How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?
Lear. You do me wrong to take me out o* the grave:

Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound

Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears

Do scald like molten lead.

Cor. Sir, do you know me?

Lear. You are a spirit, I know: when did you die?
Cor. Still, still, far wide!

Doctor. He's scarce awake: let him alone awhile.

Lear. Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight?

I am mightily abused. I should e'en die with pity,

To see another thus. I know not what to say.

I will not swear these are my hands: let's see;

I feel this pin prick. Would I were assured

Of my condition!
Cor. O, look upon me, sir,

And hold your hands in benediction o'er me.

No, sir, you must not kneel.
Lear. Pray, do not mock me:

I am a very foolish, fond old man,

Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less;

Andy to deal plainly,

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Methinks I should know you and know this man;

Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant

What place this is, and all the skill I have

Remembers not these garments, nor I know not

Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me;

208 ENJOYMENT OP LITERATURE

For, as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.
Cor. And so I am, I am.

And finally, in the utter banality of Lear's dying
words

Never, never, never, never, never!

Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir ...

there is the audacity of supreme genius.

THE contrasts in tone and pitch between these scenes
show something of Shakespeare's range, but as an exam-
ple of his most outstanding quality as a dramatist, his
comprehensiveness and far-flung scoj5e, look at Hamlet.
Here he chooses the plot of an old blood and thunder
melodrama. He takes nothing from it. Audiences in all
ages enjoy excitement and variety of action, and Shake-
speare gives them full measure: five deaths on the stage,
three appearances of a ghost, a dumb-show and a play
within the play, a mad woman, a struggle in a grave at
a funeral, a fencing match. Stabbing, drowning, poison,
pirates; an angry mob, soldiers marching, cannon firing.
It is all there. But he seizes upon the stock characters of
the old revenge story, and stuffs them with his own
vitality. Each is a living, clear-cut, familiar individual-
ity. Out of their mouths, creating these personalities,
come words which stir the spirit and kindle the senses,
and surprise and delight the mind, and melt the heart.
He adds figures of comedy who give contrast and
relief, and finally he creates a hero in whom, more than
in any other character he ever formed, he expressed all
he himself felt of the beauty, the cruelty, the mystery
of the world, and of the complexity of the human spirit.
He forced the crude old plot and its stiff stock charac-

DRAMA 209

ters to provide scope in which he could develop every
side of the most complex personality which has ever
been created in the theatre: a man who combined the
utmost physical, intellectual and emotional vitality,
humor and personal charm, and who was at the same
time in a condition of agonizing nervous tension. It is
impossible not to believe that when he wrote the play,
Shakespeare was suffering from some profound shock
to his whole nature in which his sexual feelings were
deeply involved: for what Shakespeare really added to
the play was a marvellous study of the effect on an
acutely sensitive man of the insensitiveness of his
mother. This distorts the whole of life to him, and when,
to this, is added the shock of the revelation of his
father's murder and his uncle's guilt, his sense of irony
and disillusionment produce a torture of pent-up emo-
tion, which, finding no relief in action, bursts out in
words which have never been equalled as a revelation
of the human spirit.

It is small wonder if the dramatic task of blending
this creation of character with a ready-made rubbishy
plot proved too much even for Shakespeare's scope, so
that Hamlet remains, as T. S. Eliot calls it, the Mona
Lisa of the plays. It is not Shakespeare's most perfect
work of art; it is not a coherent and consistent whole,
but the universality of Shakespeare's mind is in it more
than in any other play. There is the capacity he always
had, of evoking all types of character as easily as if he
were a conjuror bringing rabbits out of a top hat; there
in his unerring instinct for every kind of stage effect;
but above all, there is his teeming wealth of significant
language, the inexhaustible glory of his poetry. In
Hamlet more than in any of the plays, we know that
Shakespeare is the supreme dramatic poet of the modern
world, because he can do anything and everything
with words.

THE CRITIC AND THE WORLD
TODAY

piece of literature is the communication of the
experience of one individual man or woman, living in
a particular age of the world's history, and in particular
circumstances and environment. It will inevitably re-
flect a personality, but there is the further question of
how much that personality is influenced by the society
in which he lives. What is the relation of literature to
what we call the spirit of the age, pf the artist to his
contemporary world?

There is no doubt that every epoch has a quality of
its own which is the result of the social and intellectual
forces operating in it. Supposing we say 'Victorian Age'!
No sooner have we said it than our minds are flooded
with a crowd of pictures and concepts. We see a huge
company of immensely virile-looking men with mag-
nificent leonine heads and bushy beards and whiskers.
Some of them are writing optimistic poetry about im-
mortality and the joy of effort and nobility and purity;
and some of them optimistic prose about England and
political economy; some of them are declaiming in ring-
ing optimistic tones about noble causes, adult education,
housing, suffrage, and general social reform; some of
them are great scientists, with beetling brows, pointing
inexorably to skulls and rocks and monkeys; some of
them are bankers and businessmen and manufacturers
triumphantly illustrating how well the optimistic the-
ories of political economy work themselves out. There
is a crowd of clergymen being very rude to the scientists

THE CRITIC AND WORLD TODAY 211

and to each other, but all convinced that it is God's
intention that the bourgeoisie should go on forever
being extremely comfortable, and that the lower classes
should remain contentedly as they are, and be lowly
and humble and serve the bourgeoisie. There are mil-
lions of clinging, submissive, pure-minded women lean-
ing for support and guidance on the stalwart, whisk-
ered men, in houses full of solidity and dinginess and
Landseer's pictures and purplish mahogany and draw-
ing-room ballads and draperies and family prayers. And
all the men and women are absolutely convinced that
the moral and social code of their day is a combination
of the Law of Nature and the Will of God, and they
are all full of high ideals and quite obsessed with the
importance of purity.

And what happens if we try to evoke a vision of our
own world?

At once we are aware that there is no unified picture,
as there undoubtedly is of the Victorian world. Natu-
rally that picture is not in any way complete. It is sur-
prising, for instance, to find Matthew Arnold, compar-
ing the ancient world with his own, saying: 'They at
any rate, knew what they wanted in Art, and we do
not.' It seems to us as if the Victorians knew exactly
what they wanted in art. But at any rate, the picture
which emerges from the novels and poetry and social
history of the time is the embodiment of something of
immense solidity and bulk which remains forever in the
imaginations of future ages as a symbol of Victorian
civilization. And there is nothing at all in the present
world to put beside it as a symbol of our civilization.

There has never been an age in the world's history
when the social critics have not found plenty to grumble
at, and when the glorious past has not been compared
with the sorry present. Wordsworth in 1800 speaks of
'the degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation' of the

21* ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

general public; Mrs. Ellis, writing in 1839, declares, 'by
far the greater portion of the young ladies of the present
day are distinguished by a morbid listlessness of mind
and body, except when under the influence of stimulus,
a constant pining for excitement, and an eagerness to
escape from everything like practical and individual
duty/ There has never been an age which has not com-
plained that never before has progress been so slow and
youth so fast, genius so restricted and morals so loose.

There is no need to pay any attention to such eternally
recurrent criticism, for it bears no relation to any at-
tempt to see ourselves clearly. The fact remains, how-
ever, that our age is one of disintegration. The Vic-
torians had certain profoundly rooted ideas which held
them together in an organic society. Victorian man was
born within a framework of claims from country,
family, religion and society. He sincerely believed that
the code represented by these claims was the ultimate
moral law. Anyone who achieved self-mastery within
this framework was a part of the moral order of the
universe, anyone who escaped from those iron bars of
duty and set out to gratify self, was at war not only
with society, but with eternal laws, and would inevi-
tably reap his reward here or hereafter: 'the wages of
sin is death/

It was, however, Victorians who laid the foundations
of the world of today, just as it was a Jew who founded
Christianity. It was Clough, who died in 1861, who
sang:

Lo, here is God, and there is God!

Believe it not, O Man;
In such vain sort, to this and that

The ancient heathen ran:
*...

Take better part, with manly heart,
Thine adult spirit can;

THE CRITIC AND WORLD TODAY 213

Receive it not, believe it not,
Believe it not, O Man.

It was Ibsen who wrote play after play to show the
cruelty and stupidity of living by moral and social codes
which had no relation to human need and denied the
expression of natural human emotions. But the gradual
change which turned the Victorian age into our own age
is not our business here. We are concerned with trying
to picture what our own age is, and the world into
which contemporary man is born.

First and foremost, it is a world without design; there
is no framework of claims around man today. Science has
shaken his faith in religious dogma, and has forced him
to the conclusion that his life is no part of any divinely
ordered pattern: that Pope's description of the universe
as *a mighty Maze, but not without a Plan,' is delusive.
There appears to be no plan. Politically he is equally
isolated. He has no sense of belonging to a political
organism of which everyone around him is a con-
scious and willing part. He finds himself in the midst
of the ruins of an old order in politics and finance,
and the burning interest of the nineteenth century in
social reform no longer kindles him to any enthusi-
asm.

Socially, the rigid Victorian pattern of behavior has
crumbled to nothing. Man has lost his sense of sin.
Anthropology tells him that custom furnished the only
basis for ethics, and that there is no human action from
murder downwards which custom has not at one time
justified and at another condemned. Biology and psy-
chology have released him from the dominion of Asexual
taboos and parental reverence, and he finds evidence
on every hand of the corruption and self-interest which
are behind every department of organized public social
life. Finally, his thoughts of his own entity are haunted

2i 4 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

by the consciousness that death is probably annihila-
tion.

The greatest tragedy of spirit is that sooner or later
it succumbs to the flesh. Sooner or later every soul is
stifled by the sick body; sooner or later there are no
more thoughts, but only pain and vomiting and stupor.
The tragedies of the spirit are mere struttings and pos-
turings on the margin of life, and the spirit itself is
only an accidental exuberance, the product of spare
vital energy, like the feathers on the head of a hoopoe
or the innumerable populations of useless and fore-
doomed spermatozoa. The spirit has no significance,
there is only the body. . . . However lovely the feath-
ers on a bird's head, they perish with it; and the spirit,
which is a lovelier ornament than any, perishes too.

That happy vision of an ordered ^balanced composi-
tion, Man and the Universe, co-related, interdependent;
a vast order, with a place for everything and everything
gradually getting into its place, has turned into an
impressionist sketch of a vast scrapheap; and man,
shorn of his sense of security and his confidence of his
place in any ultimate scheme of things, is expelled from
his Eden. The universe has turned to a mighty stranger.

BUT what has all this to do with literature? What has
the Victorian age to do with Wuthering Heights and
The Pickwick Papers and Atalanta in Calydon and the
poems of Gerard Hopkins? What has it even to do with
the creative zest in Vanity Fair or The Mill on the Floss
or The French Revolution; with the personal passion of
Villette 9 the lyric fire of Browning, the music of Tenny-
son; with the sensitiveness of Matthew Arnold or the
sanity of Morris?

Clearly it has nothing to do with those particular

THE CRITIC AND WORLD TODAY 215

things. There is something in every work of art which
is independent of everything except the eternal emo-
tions of man. Poetry, especially, is often completely
isolated from time and place. Hardy said that 'in life
the seer should watch that pattern among general things
which his idiosyncrasy moves him to observe, and de-
scribe that alone.' This accounts for a certain massive
obtuseness in certain great artists towards the intel-
lectual advances of their day. They know that the pro-
duction of their art requires it, and are obstinately deaf
to anything but their own personal intuitions. Milton was
of this type, and Wordsworth: it is the type of the 'ego-
tistical sublime.' One suspects, too, that the great human
creative artist, the Chaucer, the Shakespeare, the Scott,
the Fielding, will make himself at home in any age.
He is too much concerned with the business of follow-
ing his own creative destiny, the getting his work done,
to bother much about the atmosphere of his age. He
takes it for granted and does not question it.

But when we have accepted that, it is still true that
the very fact that the artist possesses a sensibility be-
yond the ordinary makes him acutely impressionable to
his environment and the temper of his times. These
impose on him certain predispositions which are ines-
capable. Unconsciously they color the texture of his
thought, and open certain channels of intellectual and
emotional development to him, while they block others.
He can achieve fullness of life only if his individuality
can consort in some kind of vital sympathy with the
culture of his own day. D. H. Lawrence is a very ap-
posite example of this point. He felt himself so utterly
alien and exiled in his own age that the violence of his
disgust at it led him to seek feverishly in primitive cul-
tures what he could not find in his own, and to maim his
genius cruelly by deliberately cutting his emotional
and animal nature adrift from his intellectual con-

216 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

sciousness. Indeed, as one of the most sensitive of con-
temporary artists has said: 'The transaction between a
Writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy,
and upon a nice arrangement between the two the
whole future of his works depends.' Thus, in the nine-
teenth century, the writers whom we feel to have been
completely at home in their own age were those of
great animal vitality or simple creative zest, who, what-
ever their actual beliefs, could identify themselves easily
with the positive temper and the moral idealism of their
day; people such as Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot,
Charlotte Bronte, Carlyle, Morris, Browning, Meredith.
There are others whom we feel to have been more
or less ill-adjusted to their environment; Tennyson,
Clough, Rossetti, Arnold.

But in the world of today the position is entirely re-
versed. The temper of the age is so negative that it is
only in writers such as Shaw and Wells and Masefield,
who really belong to the last generation, that we can
find any emphasis at all on the positive values of living.
Another great lack in the inspiration of the modern
writer is the sense of significant conflict between him-
self and the creeds which surround him. For one great
advantage for literature of a strict code of dogma and
behavior, is that the struggles of the human spirit which
is tempted to rebel against its chains, and beat itself
against its prison bars, make such excellent dramatic
material for the man of letters. One cannot imagine
what the literature of the world would have been like
without the idea of the struggle in man between the
will of God, or of the gods, and the desires of his own
nature; or without the idea of the importance of
chastity in women. Three-quarters of the literature of
the world, or more, would cease to be if those subjects
were abstracted from it, and they are almost non-
existent in the serious literature of today.

THE CRITIC AND WORLD TODAY 217

Again, it is, and always has been an instinct of the
human spirit to ally itself with some conception of the
universe. It craves to feel itself a part of a whole, to
conceive of, and to believe in, some scheme in which the
individual is part of a larger coordination. Civilization
after civilization has created its mythologies, and, on a
lower plane, its political fellowships and its social com-
munities, to satisfy this need, and it is the plight of the
intelligent man of today that he finds himself among
the ruins of the communal faiths of the past, and has
no confidence in laying new foundations for the future.
In vain he turns to science to help him. In spite of the
amateur philosophizing of the great scientists he can
find no real help there. The inexorable fact meets him
that science can give no information about the intrinsic
nature of life: it can only investigate and report on its
behavior.

It is here that contemporary man, and the contem-
porary writer, baulked of his longing for a cosmic
harmony, has found the channel of investigation which
is the peculiar product of the twentieth century the
inquiry into the behavior of the individual human or-
ganism. The great writers of the past have all been con-
cerned with the relationship of the individual with
the universal forces which surround him, in whatever
framework of mythology Greek, Buddhistic, Hindu,
Hebrew or Christian they happened to see them. Each
system provided certain anthropomorphic symbols for
mysterious powers and incomprehensible phenomena,
and evolved concrete stories and personalities on which
the artist could seize. For art must work in symbols and
images. A poet such as George Herbert could, with abso-
lute simplicity and conviction, see himself and his cre-
ator in the relationship of father and child.

I struck the board, and cry'd, No more.

I will abroad.

218 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
Loose as the winde, as large as store.

Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me bloud, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?

Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dric it: there was corn

Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?

Have I no bayes to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?

All wasted?
Not so, my heart: but there is fruit,

And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not; forsake thy cage,

Thy rope of sands,

Which pettie thoughts have made, and made to thcc
Good cable, to enforce and draw,

And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.

Away; take heed:
I will abroad.
Call in thy deaths head there: tie up thy fears.

He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,

Deserves his load.
But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde

At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Childe:

And I reply'd, My Lord.

We can compare this with In Memoriam, where there
is no sense at all of a God as an all-wise and all-loving
Deity, but only of the poet's own agonized need of a
faith which will 'work 5 ! Either view would appear

THE CRITIC AND WORLD TODAY 219

definitely Mated' today. For the purposes of vital litera-
ture all the old formal myths and legends of the rela-
tion of the soul and the universe are dead. Their life is
now for us the vitality of art, not of direct experience.
When a distinguished modern poet writes a religious
poem today, he creates a series of private symbols for
his emotion. Ash Wednesday has more in common with
Herbert than with Tennyson, but it could not have
been written in either the seventeenth or the nine-
teenth centuries. And to the majority of creative artists
of today, the Soul has become the Unconscious, and
mythology has turned into the personal phantasmagorias
of The Waste Land or Ulysses.

I HAVE written elsewhere in this book on the methods
of modern literature in the revelation of the ego, and
it only remains to say something of how the character
of literature and society today particularly affects the
reader and critic of books.

The critic, like the artist, is an individual. The palate
is a very personal possession, and the sincere enjoyment
of literature depends upon the satisfaction of the per-
sonal needs of each of us: no amount of argument can
alter that. Age and temperament and personal experi-
ence are inevitably and inextricably bound up in the
responses of each individual to every work of literature
he reads. We all of us have something of John Thorpe
in us, as he gives his opinion of Madame d'Arblay's
Camilla in Nort hanger Abbey.

I took up the first volume once, and looked it over,
but I soon found it would not do; indeed I guessed
what sort of stuff it must be before I saw it; as soon as
I heard she had married an emigrant, I was sure I should
never be able to get through it.

220 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

And the limitations of the individual in criticism can
be paralleled in the limitations of the spirit of the age.
For the critic again, like the artist, lives in a particular
age of the world's history and in particular circum-
stances and environment. Each age in turn revalues
works of art according to its own needs and the quality
of its own outlook, and there is always that element in
the appreciation of literature which is summed up by
Charles IFs comment on the popularity of a certain
preacher among the Londoners of that day: 'Well, I
suppose his nonsense suits their nonsense.'

But no age is the law and the prophets. The men and
women of today, whatever their peculiarities of outlook,
are the descendants of many centuries of men and
women very much like themselves, and the literature
of today is a living part of the literary traditions of
many centuries. As individuals each of us passes:

There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the
grave; there are no voices, O Rhodope, that are not
soon mute, however tuneful: there is no name, with
whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which
the echo is not faint at last.

And as an age, our age will pass just as other ages have
passed. Future epochs will see us in perspective in the
vision of time, as we cannot see ourselves. They will
be able to sift what is ephemeral from what is lasting
in our personalities and our achievements and our writ-
ings; they will sort and catalogue our catchwords and
our affectations, our habits of mind, our beliefs and
disillusionments, our sincerities and our shams; and
label us 'early twentieth century.'

But that is not all. Behind the grouping of ideas and
fashions which create the particular pattern of our own
epoch, there are the eternal rhythms of life itself: be-
hind our particular disillusionments, there are the faiths

THE CRITIC AND WORLD TODAY 221

and the disillusionments of all time: behind our psycho-
analysis, there are the passions and frustrations of the
centuries, and behind our exploration of the uncon-
scious there is the age-old knowledge of the human
heart.

Where then shall the critic stand? 'I care not much
for new books,' wrote Montaigne in the sixteenth cen-
tury, 'because the old seem fuller and of stronger rea-
son.' It is the eternal plea of the middle-aged lover of
reading in all ages. Beside it we can put D. H. Lawrence,
'damn their discipline. If you've got to make mistakes
and who hasn't make your own, not theirs': which is
the eternal taunt of the rebel. What position shall the
critic choose? What shall be his advice to those who
want to know what books they shall read and how they
shall read them?

There are many answers.

'The important critic,' says T. S. Eliot, 'is the person
who is absorbed in the present problems of art, and who
wishes to bring the forces of the past to bear upon the
solution of these problems.' Here it is clearly the critic-
artist speaking. Another critical iconoclast, F. R. Leavis,
defines a good critic as 'one who helps the creative situa-
tion': but one cannot help thinking that the creative
situation is best left to the artists, who know very well
that the solutions of their problems have finally to be
personal to themselves.

Max Eastman will have it that criticism can be sci-
entific and that we can define literature in terms of
biology. To all its mysteries, moreover, he opposes the
view that 'it is absurd to say that these questions can-
not be answered; they can be answered as soon as we
understand our minds.' It sounds simple, and no doubt
many mysteries will be revealed when science discovers
what Life is, but meanwhile, just as the scientist cannot
explain life, but must continue to describe it in terms

222 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

of matter and energy, so the literary critic is in no
sight of the day when he can explain creation in terms
of psychology, and is still doomed to continue trying
to describe its results in terms of known experience.

I. A. Richards, who was the pioneer in the field of the
psychological interpretation of artistic experience, has
now shifted his investigations to semasiology, or the
science of language. In the future of this neglected and
obscure subject of inquiry he sees the future of all im-
portant criticism, since to ask about the meaning and
behavior of words is to challenge the entire technique
by which man interprets his modes of thought. He be-
lieves that the philosophical study of language is capa-
ble of opening to us new powers over our minds, com-
parable to those which systematic physical inquiries are
giving us over our environment.

But it is clear that such a study is a matter for
specialists. It requires an intellectual scope and a theo-
retical equipment in the knowledge of psychology and
logic far beyond the capacity of the ordinary reader,
whose comment is inevitably that of Pater on Coleridge,
*he withdraws us too much from what we can see, hear
and feel.'

Again, there is always the critic who is mainly con-
cerned with literary history, with matters of social and
intellectual background, and problems of textual schol-
arship. These things must always be the indispensable
background to the study and understanding of litera-
ture; taste cannot stand firm without knowledge. But
when all is said and done, the training of taste remains
the simplest and the most comprehensive value of
criticism.

Genius is the power of producing excellence; taste is
the power of perceiving the excellence thus produced
in its several sorts and degrees, with all their force, re-

THE CRITIC AND WORLD TODAY 223

finement, distinctions and connections. In other words,
taste is strictly the power of being properly affected by
works of genius.

To Hazlitt, the aim of criticism is to receive and to
define the characteristic quality of works of art. That is,
criticism is interpretation of literature. Taste cannot be
taught by criticism: it is familiarity with books which
alone can bring the real enjoyment of literature, but
the companionship of sympathetic interpreters can itself
be one of the great delights of reading.

There are no laws of criticism which are immutable,
and no opinions in powerful rhyme or prose which can
be cast into the monument of absolute values. Criticism,
like art itself, must always remain personal. But behind
all personal views there is a standard, which if it is not
absolute, is at least rooted and durable, just as behind
the vagaries of any one age there is the stability of the
reiterated values of all the ages. Dr. Johnson said of
The Pilgrim's Progress that it had the best of all recom-
mendations, 'the general and continued approbation
of mankind': and that is a standard which nothing can
shake. *He was on the side of sense and taste and civili-
zation'; is that not the summing up of his standpoint
which any reader of literature would choose? Problems
of pure aesthetics will always fascinate the lover of
abstract speculation. As Bradley said: 'Metaphysics is
the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon
instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.'
But the enjoyment of literature is a more general and
humane occupation. It is bound to be influenced in some
degree by the rigidities and prejudices which are in-
separable from individual human nature, but the art of
criticism (for it is an art, although a small one) has
much in common with the art of living. In both, the
positive is of more value than the negative: it is of
more importance to be cultivated than to be censorious;

224 ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

to have intellectual and emotional good breeding than
mere brains; to enjoy than to dislike; to love than to
hate. Knowledge must be there, to be sure, but to it
the man of taste brings a kind of intellectual wisdom, a
general spirit of discrimination and good judgment, a
power to recognize and to value the width and variety
of life's scope, and to relate the experiences of the mind
with those of the emotions and the senses. To him life
and literature challenge each other at every turn:
memory and revelation go hand in hand. As knowledge
of men and experience of living come to him, he re-
sponds more fully and sensitively to literature: as his
knowledge of literature increases, he responds more
fully and sensitively to life. 'One cannot be seriously
interested in literature and remain purely literary in
interests.'

Thus, although we live today in an agnostic and dis-
illusioned age, the sympathetic reader of literature,
though he can point to no tables of the law which en-
shrine the rules of his code, has nevertheless a standard
of values which he feels in his bones to be unchange-
able and unchallenged. In the midst of the crashing of
creeds and the collapse of economic, social and moral
precedent; in the midst of the greed of commerce, the
hypocrisies of politics, the vanity of dictators; in the
face of the whole chaos and confusion, the muddle and
mess, he can declare a clear and simple faith.

He can say that he believes in the eternal human
values which are incarnated in the figures of Prometheus
or Hamlet, of Esmond or Imogen, of Jane Eyre or Con-
stance Povey. He can say that he believes in the
grandeur of Paradise Lost and the grace of Gather Ye
Rosebuds, in the flame of Tyger, Tyger burning bright;
in the austerity of Rosmersbolm and the perfect har-
mony of the Ode on a Grecian Urn. He can say that he
believes in the wit of Congreve and the wisdom of

THE CRITIC AND WORLD TODAY 225

George Eliot; in the sensibility of Donne and the pro-
fundity of Dostoievsky; in the intelligence of Aldous
Huxley and the friendliness of Dr. Johnson; in the
intellectual honesty of Shaw and the intellectual curi-
osity of Wells; in the wide, sympathetic, sophisticated
sanity of Chaucer and Fielding and Tolstoi; and in the
might, majesty, dominion and power of the poetry of
Shakespeare.

This is a faith of which no lover of literature need
be ashamed; and the critic can but try to further this
faith, in a spirit of approach to both past and present
like that of one of the most wide-minded and civilized
of modern writers Arnold Bennett.

My aim has been to keep a friendly attitude; to avoid
spleen, heat, and above all, arrogance. I come neither to
scoff nor to patronize, but to comprehend.

Index

The figures in italics after colons refer to line numbers of
quoted material.

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 167
Adding Machine, The, 174,

178, 180
Addison, Joseph, 42, 48, 49,

142
A La Recherche Du Temps

Perdu, 138

Ambassadors, The, 126
Anna Karenina, 115, 125, 131
Anne, Queen, 36
Antigone, 177 f., 193
Antony and Cleopatra, 201:

S, 202 f .

Areopagitica, 40 f.
Aristotle, xi, 192 f., 195
Arnold, Dr., 103
Arnold, Matthew, 51, 149,

162, 164, 211, 214, 216
Ash Wednesday, 219
As You Like It, 188
Atalanta in Calydon, 214
Aubrey, John, 79
Austen, Jane, 32, 33, 34, 100,

no f., 116, 124, 142
Awkward Age, The, 125 f.

Balzac, Honore de, 118, 124,

126, 130

Bar chester Towers, 131
Beerbohm, Max, 60
Benet, Stephen, 165 ff.
Bennett, Arnold, 62, 109, 113,

127 ff., 132, 136, 225: 14
Benson, E. F., 89
Beowulf, 150 f.
Blake, William, 69: 31, 75:

29, 76: 15, 77: 34
Boswell, James, 63, 6 6, 82, 83,

90 ff., 100

Bradley, A. C., 176, 199
Bradley, H., 223
Brawne, Fanny, 31
Bridges, Robert, 76, 167
Bronte, Charlotte, 71, 89,

113 f., 134 f., 216
Bronte, Emily, 1 3 2 ff.
Browne, Sir Thomas, 42
Browning, Robert, 214, 216
Bunyan, John, 79 ff., 105
Burke, Edmund, 40, 41
Burns, Robert, 69: 27
Butler, Samuel, 120
Byron, Lord, 27, 88, 156

B

Bacon, Lord, 43 ff.
Ballads, 150

Carew, Thomas, 69: 18
Carlyle, Jane, 27 f., 31, 33,
34

227

228

INDEX

Carlyle, Thomas, 27, 31, 51,

85, 88, 89, 90, 216
Cavendish, George, 79, 84
Chance, 137
Charles II, 220
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1 $ 2 f .,

215, 225

Cherry Orchard, The, 179 f.
Chesterton, G. K., 59
Clough, A. H., 212 f., 216
Coleridge, S. T., 25, 26, 36 f.,

42, 53 ff., 63, 204, 222
Comedy, i84ff., 196
Congreve, William, 177, 186,

200, 224

Conquistador, 165
Conrad, Joseph, 115, 121 f.,

132, 137

Country Wife, The, 188 f.

Coverley, Sir Roger de, pa-
pers, 48, 5 1

Cowley, Abraham, 45 ff., 58

Cowper, William, 32

Craft of Fiction, The, 126

D

Darnley, George, 65: 26

Da vid Cop per field, 115,

119 ff.

Deffand, Madame du, 23, 31
Defoe, Daniel, 117
de la Mare, Walter, x
Desire under the Elms, 180
Dickens, Charles, 113, 118,

119 ff., 132, 138, 176, 216
Dingley, Rebecca, 21, 30
Doctor Faustus, 200 f.
Doctor's Dilemma, The, 188,

190
Donne, John, 73: 21, 26, 74:

8, 88, 225

Dos Passos, John, 115, 124,

140 ff.

Dostoievsky, Fyodor, 1 18, 225
Dramatic Poetry, 199 ff.
Drury Lane Theatre, 36
Dryden, John, 78, 82, 192 f.
Duchess of Malfi, The, 193
Dynasts, The, 167 ff.

Earthly Paradise, The, 156

Eastman, Max, 221

Electra, 184

Eliot, George, 113, 118, 132,
216, 225

Eliot, T. S., 59, 209, 221

Elizabethan Stage, 179

Eminent Victorians, 87, 89,
104

Essay on the Human Under-
standing, 39

Euripides, 179, 193

Evelyn, John, 35

Eve of St. Agnes, The, 38,
153 ff.

Excursion, The, 167

Expressionism (in drama) ,
178 f., 180

Falstaff, 190 f.
Father and Son, 104 ff.
Faulkner, William, 142
Fielding, Henry, 22, 24, 66,

113, 117, 136, 215, 225
Fitzgerald, Edward, 34
Flaubert, Gustave, 127
Form in Art, 38 f., 197
Fox, Charles James, 36
French Revolution, The, 214
Froude, J. A., 89

INDEX

229

Galsworthy, John, 176, 200

Gaskell, Mrs., 89

Gather Ye Kosebuds, 224

Ghosts, 188, 193

Godwin, William, 26

Goethe, 27, 39

Goldsmith, Oliver, 48, 52, 83

Gordon, General, 101 ff.

Gosse, Edmund, 86, 104 ff.

Grace Abounding, 79 ff., 105

Gray, Thomas, 82 f.

Great God Broivn, The, 179

Greek Theatre, The, 179, 195

Greene, Robert, 34

H

Hairy Ape, The, 174, 180
Hamlet, 174, 178, 198 f.,

208 f., 224
Hardy, Thomas, 132, 167 ff.,

215
Hazlitt, William, 26, 52 ff.,

58, 59, 60, 187, 223
Hemingway, Ernest, 115, 142
Herbert, George, 88, 217^.
Hero and Leander, 1 5 6 f .
Hobbes, Thomas, 79
Homer, 147 ff., 160, 179
Hopkins, Gerard, 214
Housman, A. E., 63
Hunt, Leigh, 26
Huxley, Aldous, 117, 122,

142, 214: 3, 225

Importance of Being Earnest,

The, 184

In Mentor /am, 218 f.
Irony (dramatic), 174 f.,

183 f., 195 ff., 199

James, Henry, ii4f., 124,

125 f., 137, 173
Jane Eyre, 113 f., 116, 132,

224

Jeffrey, Francis, 77: 24
John Brown's Body, 165 ff.
John Gabriel Borkman, 179
Johnson, Esther (Stella),

20 f., 30 f., 32, 35, 36
Johnson, Samuel, x, 22, 24, 49,

63, 82, 83 f., 85, 87 f., 90,

164, 223, 225 (Boswell's

Life) , 90 ff., Life of Savage,

96 ff.

Jonson, Ben, 200
Joseph Andrews, 22
Joyce, James, 1 15, 138 ff., 142
Justice, 174, 1 8 8, 197

K

Keats, John, 31, 62: 23, 72 f.,

73 : 3^74*75: *9>77> *>9o
King Lear, 198, 201: 19,

206 ff.
Kip ps, 114

Kiss for Cinderella, A, 187
Knight's Tale, The, 1 5 2 f .

Ibsen, Henrik, 1 77, 1 79, 1 8 1 f .,

195, 200, 202, 213
Idylls of the King, The, 156
Iliad, The, 147 ff., 148: 15

Lamb, Charles, 25 ff., 34,
36 f., 39, 42, 44, 52, 56 ff.
Lamb, Mary, 25

2 3

INDEX

Landor, W. S., 160, 164, 220:

18
Lawrence, D. H., ix, 37, 69,

75, 114, 215 f., 221
Lays of Ancient Rome, The,

156

Leavis, F. R., 221, 224: 14
Lewis, Sinclair, 142
Locke, William, 39
Lodge, Thomas, 65: 12, 66:

*7
Logan, John, 65: 22

Lor^ //' w, 115
Love for Love, 186
Lowell, Amy, 90
Lubbock, Percy, 126

M

Macaulay, Lord, 24, 51, 59
Macbeth, 174, 183, 204 ff.
MacLeish, Archibald, 165
Madame Bovary, 124
Man and Superman, 174, 188,

189

Man and the Masses, 179
Manhattan Transfer, 140 ff.
Manning, Cardinal, 101 ff.
Marlowe, Christopher, 1 5 6 f .,

201 f.

M arm Ion, 156
Marvell, Andrew, 74: 6
Masefield, John, 156, 216
Mason, William, 82 f., 89, 90
Maugham, Somerset, i2of.
Maupassant, Guy de, 127
Maurois, Andre, 100
Measure for Measure, 192
Merchant of Venice, The, 192
Meredith, George, 69, 185, 216
Middlemarch, 132
Midsummer Night's Dream,

A, 187

Mill on the Floss, The, 214

Milton, John, 38, 40 f., 44,
50, S9> 63 73 = 29, 102,
159 ff., 171, 198, 215

Montagu, Lady Mary Wort-
ley, 21 ff., 27, 32, 33, 35

Montaigne, Michel de, 42,
43 f., 45, 60, 78, 84, 221

More, Hannah, 34

Morris, William, 156, 214,
216

Mourning Becomes Electra,

*95

Mr. Polly, 114, 115
Mrs. Dalloway, 115
Much Ado About Nothing,

1 9* .

Munro, C. K., 182
Murry, Middleton, 37, 116

N

Newman, Cardinal, 102 f.

Nicolson, Harold, 84 f., 100

Nightingale, Florence, 101

1919, 115

North, Roger, 82

N or t hanger Abbey, 219

O

Ode on a Grecian Urn, 224
Ode to Autumn, 72 f.
Odyssey, The, 147 ff., 147:

15, 148: 28

Of Human Bondage, 120 f.
Old Wives 9 Tale, The, inf.,

127 ff., 145
O'Neill, Eugene, 179, 180,

182 f., 195
Osborne, Dorothy, 15 ff.,

28 flf., 32, 34

INDEX

Othello, 174 ff., 189, 193,
198 f., 203 f., 206

Parker, Dorothy, 37
Paradise Lost, 160 ff., 224
Paston, Margaret, 37
Pater, Walter, 59, 222
Peacock, T. L., 117
Pendennis, 84, n8f., 120,

126
Pepys, Samuel, 19 f., 23, 32 f.,

35 36, 187

Pickwick Papers, The, 214
Pilgrim's Progress, The, 81,

223
Playboy of the Western

World, The, 174
Plot (in the novel), 121 ff.;

(in drama), 175 ff.
Plutarch, 78
Poe, Edgar Allan, 73: $
Point Counterpoint, 122, 214:

3
Pope, Alexander, 34, 157!!.,

213

Pride and Prejudice, no
Priestley, J. B., 39
Prometheus Unbound, 167
Proust, Marcel, 116, 124, 137,

138

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 68: 1 8
Rape of the Lock, The, 1 57 ff.
Read, Herbert, 65: 30
Realism (in drama), 177 f.
Rhythm, 67 ff.
Richards, I. A., 222
Richardson, Samuel, 117

Ring and the Book, The, 156
Rivals, The, 184, 185
Romances, 1 5 1
Romeo and Juliet, 176, 188,

193, 202

Rosmersholm y 179, 224
Rossetti, D. G., 74, 216
Ruskin, John, 70

Saint Joan, 174, 193
Savage, Life of , 82, 83 f., 85,

96 ff.

Schiller, W., 27
School for Scandal, The, 184,

185, 186

Scott, Sir Walter, 113, 215
Shakespeare, William, 59, 75:

25, 101, 176, 177, i86ff.,

195 ff., 215, 225
Shakespearean Comedy, 186 ff.
Shaw, George Bernard, 173,

176, 177, 185 f., 189 f.,

200, 216, 225
Shelley, P. B., 62, 67: 6, 69,

7S 167

Sheridan, R. B., 200
Silver Box, The, 188, 195
Smart, Christopher, 66: 31,

67: I, 69: 23
Smith, Alexander, 43
Sophocles, 184, 193
Spectator, the, 42, 48
Spenser, Edmund, 1 5 2 f
Steele, Richard, 48, 58, 59
Stella, Journal to, 21, 30
Stendhal, 1 1 8
Sterne, Laurence, no, 115
Stevenson, R. L., 19, 49 ff.
Strachey, Lytton, 85 ff.,

89 f., 96, 99, 100 ff.
Strange Interlude, 174, 182 f.

232

INDEX

U

Swift, Jonathan, 20 f., 29 ff.,

3 2 33 35 36 I02
Symbolism (in drama), 177 Ulysses, 138 ff., 219
ff.

Synge,J.M.,68: 7

Vanya, 180, 188
V

Vanessa, 3 1

Vanity Fair, no f., 119, 124,

126, 214

Victoria, Queen, 101 ff.
Victorian Age, The, 2ioff.
Victorian Novel, The, 1 1 8 ff.
Villette,2i4
Virgil, 149, 1 60

Tatler, the, 47, 48
Tchekov, Anton, 177, 179
Technique (in the novel)
123 ff.; (in the drama)

i 73 ff.

Tempest, The, 181, 191

Temple, Sir William, ijff., Volpone, 187, 188

20, 32, 47
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 31,

69, 88, 156, 214, 216,

219
Testament of Beauty, The,

165, 167
Thackeray, W. M., 84, 113,

1 1 6, 118 f., 124, 126 f.,

132

Thrale, Mrs., 91
Three Sisters, The, 174, 188,

197

Toller, Ernst, 179
Tolstoi, Leo, 113, n8, 124,

128, 225
Tono Bun gay, 114

W

Walpole, Horace, 23 ff., 31 f.,

33> 34 36, 185
Walton, Izaac, 88
Waste Land, The, 219
Watching a Play, 182
Waves, The, 125, 139
Way of All Flesh, The, 120
Way of the World, The, 174,

185, 186, 187, 190
Wells, H. G., ii4f., 141,

216, 225

White Devil, The, 201
Whitman, Walt, 87

To the Lighthouse, 112, 123, Wild Duck, The, 174, 182,

143 ff.

Tragedy, 184, 188, 192 ff.
Tragic Hero, The, 194 ff.
Tristram Shandy, uy
Troilus and Criseyde, 152, 155

197

Wilson, D. A., 90
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 36
Woolf, Virginia, 39 f., 51,

115, 139, 142 ff.

Trojan Women, The, 179, Woollcott, Alexander, 37

i93 197

Trollope, Anthony, 216
Tyger, tyger, 224

Wordsworth, Dorothy, 29,

54> 55> 75
Wordsworth, Mrs., 25, 29

INDEX 233

Wordsworth, William, 29, Y

54 f., 73: 3, 75: 33, 76: i,

167, 211, 215 Yeats, W. B., 200

Wuthering Heights, 117, 124, You Never Can Tell, 191

132 ff., 214